Wallace Stegner Quotes - Page 4

Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree.

Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?... Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me?

We are fossils in the making.

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

Thanks to the growing strength of environmental organizations, there will always be some back country to provide us with a touch of wonder and a breath of fresh air.

I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.

One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples.

There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance, said the Ellen Ward of my dream, that woman I hate and fear. I am sure she meant some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning together from the vertical which produces the false arch.

[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.

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.

We need wilderness preserved-as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds-because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.

Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.

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

It is the abiding concern of thinking people to preserve what keeps men human-to save our contact with nature of which we are a part.

Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.

If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c , anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me. I may even have contributed to it in minor ways, for culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone.

Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.

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

A muddy little stream, a village grown unfamiliar with time and trees. I turn around and retrace my way up Main Street and park and have a Coke in the confectionery store. It is run by a Greek, as it used to be, but whether the same Greek or another I would not know. He does not recognize me, nor I him. Only the smell of his place is familiar, syrupy with old delights, as if the ghost of my first banana split had come close to breathe on me.

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

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.

Have a chance to create a society to match its scenery.

No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.

You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.

There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.