Wallace Stegner Quotes

109 quotes in 1664 categories

• But however you might rebel, there was no shedding them. They were your responsibility and there was no one to relieve you of them. They…
• We simply need that wild country available to us... For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part…
• Water is the true wealth in a dry land.
• Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened.
• Every book that anyone sets out on is a voyage of discovery that may discover nothing. Any voyager may be lost at sea, like John…
• Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
• How much wilderness do the wilderness-lovers want? ask those who would mine and dig and cut and dam in such sanctuary spots as these. The…
• 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…
• No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
• There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance ... some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my…
• This early piece of the morning is mine.
• There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.
• Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?
• Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down…
• Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed We need wilderness preserved — as…
• I was shaped by the west and have lived most of my life in it, and nothing would gratify me more than to see it…
• National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.
• We need wilderness preserved-as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds-because it was the challenge against which our character as a…
• If the national park is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America has ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea,
• You achieve stature only by being good enough to deserve it, by forcing even the contemptuous and indifferent to pay attention, and to acknowledge that…

Browse Wallace Stegner Quotes by Category