Wallace Stegner Quotes

National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.

We simply need that wild country available to us... For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.

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.

Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.

She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.

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

Hard writing makes easy reading.

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.

Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.

Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.

American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.

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

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.

wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.

It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one. Through friendships, we spark and inspire one another's ambitions.

Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.

Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened.

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

If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.

The brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks.

The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.

Water is the true wealth in a dry land.

We are the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.

A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.

There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.

it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.

If you avoid the killer diseases and keep the degenerative ones under control with sensible diet and exercise and whatever chemotherapy you need to stay in balance, you can live nearly forever.

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

We write to make sense of it all.

It is somethingit can be everything-to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below.

History is not the proper midden for digging up novelties. Perhaps that is one reason why a nation bent on novelty ignores it.

If we don't know where we are, we don't know who we are.

No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Expose a child to a particular environment at this susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.

Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.

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

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.

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.

Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.

Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.

Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.

I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.