Wallace Stegner Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Wallace Stegner on Wise Famous Quotes.
History is not the proper midden for digging up novelties. Perhaps that is one reason why a nation bent on novelty ignores it.
There is something about all beards that is like the gesture of thumbing the nose. Thank you very much. Up yours.
When you're nailing a custard pie to the wall, and it starts to wilt, it doesn't do any good to hammer in more nails. Now
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.
No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples.
Satisfying natural desires is fine, but natural desires have a way of being both competitive and consequential.
Wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.
He still wore, in the warming barracks, a muskrat cap with earlaps. Under it his eyes were gray as agates, as sudden as an elbow in the solar plexus.
He looks into his Dixie cup and looks back up as if surprised at what he found there. The future, maybe.
A wandering dog of a night wind came in off the sagebrush mesa carrying a bar of band music, and laid it on her doorstep like a bone.
It is not queer, and both desolating and comforting, how, with all associations broken, one forms new ones, as a broken bone thickens in healing.
within yourself, you became a grave for her as you were a grave for Chet, and you carried your dead unquietly within you. -
Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.
The perfect weather of Indian Summer lengthened and lingered, warm sunny days were followed by brisk nights with Halloween a presentiment in the air.
American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
Values, both those that we approve and those that we don't, have roots as deep as creosote rings, and live as long and grow as slowly
National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.
Drama demands the reversal of expectation, but in such a way that the first surprise is followed by an immediate recognition of inevitability.
Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn't struck you.
Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.
Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for.
The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.
If the national park is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America has ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea,
Order is indeed the dream of man, but chaos, which is only another word for dumb, blind, witless chance, is still the law of nature.
Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.
In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.
Expose a child to a particular environment at this susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.
There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.
Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can't have a by-product unless you've got a product first.
The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.