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Wallace Stegner Quotes

If I spoke to Rodman in those terms, saying that my grandparents' lives seem to me organic and ours what? hydroponic? he would ask in derision what I meant. Define my terms. How do you measure the org...

Wallace Stegner

If I spoke to Rodman in those terms, saying that my grandparents' lives seem to me organic and ours what? hydroponic? he would ask in derision what I meant. Define my terms. How do you measure the org...

Tags: human life, immeasurability, organic

I wouldn't live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn't want it next door. I'm not too happy it's within ten miles. Why? Because their soft-headedness irritates me. B...

Wallace Stegner

I wouldn't live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn't want it next door. I'm not too happy it's within ten miles. Why? Because their soft-headedness irritates me. B...

Tags: civilization, colonization, commune, crowds, history, human nature, idealism, noise, privacy, society

About Author
Wallace Earle Stegner (February 18, 1909 – April 13, 1993) was an American novelist, writer, environmentalist, and historian. He was often called "The Dean of Western Writers". He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977.

What do you mean, 'Angle of Repose?' she asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother's life, and I said it was the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down. I suppose it is; and y...

Wallace Stegner

What do you mean, 'Angle of Repose?' she asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother's life, and I said it was the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down. I suppose it is; and y...

Tags: intersection, life lines, love, marriage, married life, matrimony, parallels, perspective, pride, resignation

We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have ch...

Wallace Stegner

We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have ch...

Tags: build up, chronology, development, existentialism, family, generation gap, history, life, modernity, past

It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.

Wallace Stegner

It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.

Tags: conduct of life, life, rules, society

Oh, listen. Listen!' A sound like a big crowd a good way off, excited and shouting, getting closer. We stand up and scan the empty sky. Suddenly there they are (the geese), a wavering V headed directl...

Wallace Stegner

Oh, listen. Listen!' A sound like a big crowd a good way off, excited and shouting, getting closer. We stand up and scan the empty sky. Suddenly there they are (the geese), a wavering V headed directl...

Tags: geese, nature, reflection, stilling

Under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of life in the Rocky Mountains there was something exciting and vital, full of rude poetry: the heartbeat of the West as it fought its way upward toward ci...

Wallace Stegner

Under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of life in the Rocky Mountains there was something exciting and vital, full of rude poetry: the heartbeat of the West as it fought its way upward toward ci...

Tags: civilization, heartbeat, poetry, rocky mountains, rough, roughness, west

[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was...

Wallace Stegner

[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was...

Tags: back to school, fall, new beginnings, september, summer

What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the world? Our hottest arguments were always about how we could contribute. We did not care...

Wallace Stegner

What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the world? Our hottest arguments were always about how we could contribute. We did not care...

Tags: contributions, passion, youth

In general the assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a new country had no history. History was something that applied to other places.

Wallace Stegner

In general the assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a new country had no history. History was something that applied to other places.

Tags: memory, public history

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, the...

Wallace Stegner

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, the...

Tags: conservation, cooperation, environment, individualism, optimism

The forces of blind life that work across this hilltop are as irresistible as she said they were, they work by a principle more potent than fission. But I can’t look upon them as just life, impartial...

Wallace Stegner

The forces of blind life that work across this hilltop are as irresistible as she said they were, they work by a principle more potent than fission. But I can’t look upon them as just life, impartial...

Tags: good vs evil, humanity, life, nature

We were two of a kind, the only difference being that he was reverential before all the traditional word magic, and I would steal it if I could. He came to the tradition as a pilgrim, I as a pickpocke...

Wallace Stegner

We were two of a kind, the only difference being that he was reverential before all the traditional word magic, and I would steal it if I could. He came to the tradition as a pilgrim, I as a pickpocke...

Tags: pilgrim, reverence, theft, tradition

That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. It's all right, he said. But I'd take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That's about used up, I...

Wallace Stegner

That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. It's all right, he said. But I'd take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That's about used up, I...

Tags: exaggeration, metaphors, mythology, writing

Before I can say , I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was, w...

Wallace Stegner

Before I can say , I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was, w...

Tags: family, heritage, identity, morality, past, personal history, personality, predispositions, values

It's idealistic, it's for love and gentleness, it's close to nature, it hurts nobody, it's voluntary. I can't see anything wrong with any of that.''Neither can I. The only trouble is, this commune wil...

Wallace Stegner

It's idealistic, it's for love and gentleness, it's close to nature, it hurts nobody, it's voluntary. I can't see anything wrong with any of that.''Neither can I. The only trouble is, this commune wil...

Tags: crowds, humanity, idealism, individuality, privacy

He has a way of walking through conventions of that kind as if they did not exist, and being so much himself that pretty soon people begin adapting themselves to him.

Wallace Stegner

He has a way of walking through conventions of that kind as if they did not exist, and being so much himself that pretty soon people begin adapting themselves to him.

The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.

Wallace Stegner

The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.

If you could forget mortality... You could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the...

Wallace Stegner

If you could forget mortality... You could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving. Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the...

Tags: culture, literature

It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humble ones…Puny you may feel there, and vulnerable, but not unnoticed. This is a land to mark the sparrow’s...

Wallace Stegner

It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humble ones…Puny you may feel there, and vulnerable, but not unnoticed. This is a land to mark the sparrow’s...

Tags: environmental history, great plains