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. — 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 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
“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 Image
Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable. — 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 things. His… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
“The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas, not inhabited by them; they should flit past the windows after dark, not fill the rooms. The moment anyone tries to make poems or stories of ideas alone he is at the edge of absurdity; he can only harangue, never interest and… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share
You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me. — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
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 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
