Wallace Stegner Quotes

She studied it soberly, with something like recognition or acknowledgment in her eyes, as if those who have been dead understand things that will never be understood by those who have only lived.

So what happened when base desires and unworthy passions troubled the flesh of men and women inhibited from casual promiscuity, adultery, and divorce that keep us so healthy?

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if...

There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you- a train, say, or the future- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away....

There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic. When you stand outside a door and push the button, something has to happen. Someone must respond; whatever is inside mus...

Westerners live outdoors more than people elsewhere because outdoors is mainly what they've got.

What should one do? If Ruth had any better luck with him I would have thought that he simply had to attach himself to antifatherly gods until he proved himself a man in his own terms...She followed hi...

Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.

You'll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you're very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide.

After a day and a half or so the traveler will realize that crossing the continent by Interstate he gets to know the country about as well as a cable messenger knows the sea bottom.

Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?

For somehow, against probability, some sort of indigenous, recognizable culture has been growing on western ranches and in western towns and even in western cities. It is the product not of the boomer...

Good fortune, contentment, peace, happiness have never been able to deceive me for long. I expected the worst, and I was right. So much for the dream of man.

Hard writing makes easy reading.

He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.

Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn’t struck you.

His mouth is full of ecology, his mind is full of fumes.

Homesickness is a great teacher. It taught me, during an endless rainy fall, that I came from the arid lands, and like where I came from. I was used to dry clarity and sharpness in the air. I was used...

Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.

How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the viole...