“There are several dubious assumptions about the early West. One is that it was the home of intractable self-reliance amounting to anarchy, whereas in fact large parts of it were owned by Eastern and foreign capital and run by iron-fisted… — 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… — Wallace Stegner Copy Share Image
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
