Wallace Stegner Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Wallace Stegner quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

What the disorderly crave above everything is order, what the dislocated aspire to is location. — Wallace Stegner

Where do I belong in this country? Where is home? — Wallace Stegner

There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences. — Wallace Stegner

Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality. — Wallace Stegner

The brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks. — Wallace Stegner

After all, what are any of us after but the conviction of belonging? — Wallace Stegner

History is not the proper midden for digging up novelties. Perhaps that is one reason why a nation bent on novelty ignores it. — Wallace Stegner

We write to make sense of it all. — Wallace Stegner

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention ... — Wallace Stegner

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

When you marry into a Mormon family you marry tribes and nations. — Wallace Stegner

A poem isn't selfish. It speaks to people. — Wallace Stegner

Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime's worth of lessons. — Wallace Stegner

What little strength he had left flowed out of him and was soaked up; his bones and veins and skin held nothing but tiredness and pain. — Wallace Stegner

In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth. — Wallace Stegner

When you're nailing a custard pie to the wall, and it starts to wilt, it doesn't do any good to hammer in more nails. Now — Wallace Stegner

There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic. — Wallace Stegner

Poems ought to reflect the work the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organization. — Wallace Stegner

For complete information about — Wallace Stegner

You hear what the dean said about Jesus Christ? 'Sure He's a good teacher, but what's He published? — Wallace Stegner

I'm a huge fan of San Francisco. And I was out here for a couple years in the mid-'90s when I was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. — Stacey D'Erasmo

You can't be close to the mortality of friends without being brought to think of your own. — Wallace Stegner

Well, there's so much to read, and I'm so far behind. — Wallace Stegner

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

No Eden valid without serpent. — Wallace Stegner

We're all tougher than we think we are. We're fixed so that almost anything heals. — Wallace Stegner

Expose a child to a particular environment at this susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies. — Wallace Stegner

We are fossils in the making. — Wallace Stegner

Order is indeed the dream of man, but chaos, which is only another word for dumb, blind, witless chance, is still the law of nature. — Wallace Stegner

There is no way to step off the tread mill. It is all treadmill. — Wallace Stegner

You can't retire to weakness
you've got to learn to control strength. — Wallace Stegner

I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun. — Wallace Stegner

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, — Wallace Stegner

Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept. — Wallace Stegner

I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships. — Wallace Stegner

Children from a big family have the benefit of a certain amount of neglect. — Wallace Stegner

No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike. — Wallace Stegner

She was still developing her sundial theory of art, which would count no hours but the sunny ones. — Wallace Stegner

To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free. — Wallace Stegner

A wandering dog of a night wind came in off the sagebrush mesa carrying a bar of band music, and laid it on her doorstep like a bone. — Wallace Stegner

It almost was. With — Wallace Stegner

If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get. — Wallace Stegner

No place is a place until it has found its poet. — Wallace Stegner

There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis. — Wallace Stegner

It is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers. — Wallace Stegner

You'll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you're very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide. — Wallace Stegner

Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting? — Wallace Stegner

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

Their humor is underdog humor, a put-down of what is more powerful than they. — Wallace Stegner

Satisfying natural desires is fine, but natural desires have a way of being both competitive and consequential. — Wallace Stegner

Water is the true wealth in a dry land. — Wallace Stegner

One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples. — Wallace Stegner

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

A poet is somebody who has written a poem. — Wallace Stegner

Girl of eighteen named Elsa Norgaard, — Wallace Stegner

He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man — Wallace Stegner

It is the abiding concern of thinking people to preserve what keeps men human-to save our contact with nature of which we are a part. — Wallace Stegner

I'm tired of hearing that the Lord shapes the back to the burden. — Wallace Stegner

National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst. — Wallace Stegner

You must have brought something. Books? I never saw you without a green bag of books. — Wallace Stegner

Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to. — Wallace Stegner

Our last impression of her as she turned the corner was that smile, flung backward like a handful of flowers. — Wallace Stegner

Drama demands the reversal of expectation, but in such a way that the first surprise is followed by an immediate recognition of inevitability. — Wallace Stegner

Nothing is so safe as habit, even when habit is faked. — Wallace Stegner

Wisdom is knowing what you can accept. — Wallace Stegner

If we don't know where we are, we don't know who we are. — Wallace Stegner

American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging. — Wallace Stegner

Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness. — Wallace Stegner

He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best. — Wallace Stegner

Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn't struck you. — Wallace Stegner

Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards. — Wallace Stegner

The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private. — Wallace Stegner

Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. — Wallace Stegner

The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends. — Wallace Stegner

She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into. — Wallace Stegner

Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it. — Wallace Stegner

I hope they have found enough pleasure along the way so that they don't want it ended — Wallace Stegner

Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view on earth,.. — 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

The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process. — Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner once wrote that the lessons of life amount to scar tissue. — Michael McGarrity

Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend. — Wallace Stegner

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game. — Wallace Stegner

A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out. — Wallace Stegner

Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer. — Wallace Stegner

Hard writing makes easy reading. — Wallace Stegner

There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters. — Wallace Stegner

Habit is my true, my wedded wife. — Wallace Stegner

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

She was so old, she would have had to be dated by carbon 14. — Wallace Stegner

When we're young, we take so casually every sacrifice offered by the old. — Wallace Stegner

I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me. — Wallace Stegner

In my experience, the world's happiest man is a young professor building bookcases. — Wallace Stegner

I tell him I am proud of his genius for construction, but he says he has no genius for anything, he just never knows when he is beaten. — Wallace Stegner

We do not write what we know; we write what we want to find out. — Wallace Stegner

Sitting in Grandmother's old wicker chair and littering my porch with her foolish young life. — Wallace Stegner

I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from. — Wallace Stegner

intellectual hare — 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 and grow as slowly — Wallace Stegner

His mouth is full of ecology, his mind is full of fumes. — Wallace Stegner