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
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
“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
“[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
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
“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
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
Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. — 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
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
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
Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to. — 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
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
“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
“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 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
“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
“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
“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
“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
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
“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
“sitting in Grandmother's old wicker chair and littering my porch with her foolish young life.” — 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
