Wallace Stegner Quotes

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not towisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

Poems ought to reflect the the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organization.

Perhaps it took several generations to make a man, perhaps it took several combinations and re-creations of his mother’s gentleness and resilience, his father’s enormous energy and appetite for the ne...

What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is...

When she stopped short just at the lower line of the apple tress, and stood for a moment with her face lifted, I chalked one up in her favor. I had stopped my chair at the exact place, coming out, bec...

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation becomes a game.

When we’re young, we take so casually every sacrifice offered by the old.

She said in response to Hernandez's soft greeting. They had a pact to speak only Spanish to each other, with the result that their conversation never got beyond hello and good-bye.

I know no way of discounting the doctrine that when you take something you want, and damn the consequences, then you had better be ready to accept whatever consequences ensue.

We must be reconciled, for what we left behind us can never be ours again.

What little strength he had left flowed out of him and was soaked up; his bones and veins and skin held nothing but tiredness and pain.

The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.

We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged and panted it out the whole way.

This early piece of the morning is mine.

Isn’t it complicated to be human, though? she said. Animals seem to give up their lives so naturally…And after all, I grew up, I married John, I had Debby. So knowing, being able to understand and for...

Marian’s eyes absolutely blaze. To meet them is to have a shock of contact as if they were electrically charged. Now you see? You wondered what was in whale’s milk. Don’t you know now? The same thing...

Home was a curious thing, like happiness. You never knew you had had it until it was gone.

I have heard of people's lives being changed by a dramatic or traumatic event--a death, a divorce, a winning lottery ticket, a failed exam. I never heard of anybody's life but ours being changed by a...