“The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.” — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to. — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships. — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike. — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of,… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends. — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can't have a by-product unless you've got a product first .” — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“sitting in Grandmother's old wicker chair and littering my porch with her foolish young life.” — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“[Y]ou were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase [angle of repose] as descriptive of human… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“Yet now, having held in grief and resentment, and evaded thinking too much about the episode that changed my life with the… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“It was as if she had thought him into existence again, as if her mind were a flask into which had been… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“Though I have been busy, perhaps overbusy, all my life, it seems to me now that I have accomplished little that matters,… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“It is not an unusual life curve for Westerners - to live i n and be shaped by the bigness, sparseness, space… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
... I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
But however you might rebel, there was no shedding them. They were your responsibility and there was no one to relieve you… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“She has had no role in my life except to keep me sane, fed, housed, amused, and protected from unwanted telephone calls,… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“If Henry Adams, whom you knew slightly, could make a theory of history by applying the second law of thermodynamics to human… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“I wouldn't live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn't want it next door. I'm… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“Walk openly, Marian used to say. Love even the threat and the pain, feel yourself fully alive, cast a bold shadow, accept,… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“And I would not blame you if you still asked, Why bother to make contact with kindred spirits you never see and… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“It reminds me too much of how little life changes: how, without dramatic events or high resolves, without tragedy, without even pathos,… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“Under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of life in the Rocky Mountains there was something exciting and vital, full of rude poetry:… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
I was shaped by the west and have lived most of my life in it, and nothing would gratify me more than… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one.… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do,… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“I have to blame myself for not finding any way of reaching him, but I can't feel that either Ruth or I had anything… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike. — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
“within yourself, you became a grave for her as you were a grave for Chet, and you carried your dead unquietly within you. —” — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable. — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
“The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
“Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can't have a by-product unless you've got a product first .” — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
“Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch the button and wait for the print-out. Mine is more… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
“[Y]ou were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase [angle of repose] as descriptive of human as well… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
![“[Y]ou were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase [angle of repose] as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; you tried to apply it to your own wandering and uneasy life ... I wonder if you ever reached it.” quote by Wallace Stegner](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/7b2/wallace-stegner-1352_life_y-ou-were-too-alert-to-the-figurative-po_96500.jpg)
![“We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [...] My grandparents had to live their…” quote by Wallace Stegner](https://sms4smile.com/q/img-quotes/845/wallace-stegner-1352_build-up_we-have-been-cut-off-the-past-has-been-e_1335439.jpg)
