Wallace Stegner

I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.

— Wallace Stegner

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

— Wallace Stegner

“As moonlight unto sunlight is that desert sage to other greens.”

— Wallace Stegner

A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out.

— Wallace Stegner

That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.

— Wallace Stegner

We were going to leave a mark on the world but instead the world left marks on us.

— Wallace Stegner

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

— Wallace Stegner

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

— Wallace Stegner

It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar…

— Wallace Stegner

“There is one thing above all others that I despise. It is fingers, especially female fingers, messing around in my guts. My…

— Wallace Stegner

“For history is a pontoon bridge. Every man walks and works at its building end, and has come as far as he…

— Wallace Stegner

“What little strength he had left flowed out of him and was soaked up; his bones and veins and skin held nothing…

— Wallace Stegner

Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that…

— Wallace Stegner

If the national park is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America has ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement…

— Wallace Stegner

Values, both those that we approve and those that we don't, have roots as deep as creosote rings, and live as long…

— Wallace Stegner

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

— Wallace Stegner

“Largeness is a lifelong matter,” he wrote. “. . . You grow because you are not content not to. You are like…

— Wallace Stegner

“It is not an unusual life curve for Westerners - to live i n and be shaped by the bigness, sparseness, space…

— Wallace Stegner

“One thing I have learned hard, if indeed I have learned it now: it is a reduction of our humanity to hide…

— Wallace Stegner

I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched…

— Wallace Stegner

“What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the…

— Wallace Stegner

“And I would not blame you if you still asked, Why bother to make contact with kindred spirits you never see and…

— Wallace Stegner

“It reminds me too much of how little life changes: how, without dramatic events or high resolves, without tragedy, without even pathos,…

— Wallace Stegner

You achieve stature only by being good enough to deserve it, by forcing even the contemptuous and indifferent to pay attention, and…

— Wallace Stegner

“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

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed We need wilderness…

— Wallace Stegner

“Walk openly, Marian used to say. Love even the threat and the pain, feel yourself fully alive, cast a bold shadow, accept,…

— Wallace Stegner

“There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic. When you stand outside a door and push the…

— Wallace Stegner

If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West…

— Wallace Stegner

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

— Wallace Stegner

“sitting in Grandmother's old wicker chair and littering my porch with her foolish young life.”

— Wallace Stegner

Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.

— Wallace Stegner

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

— Wallace Stegner

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

— Wallace Stegner

“We must be reconciled, for what we left behind us can never be ours again.”

— Wallace Stegner

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

— Wallace Stegner

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

— Wallace Stegner

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

— Wallace Stegner

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

— Wallace Stegner

“There is no way to step off the tread mill. It is all treadmill.”

— Wallace Stegner