Wallace Stegner Quotes

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter ...

In general the assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a n...

I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.

It is not an unusual life curve for Westerners - to live i n and be shaped by the bigness, sparsenes...

I can't see that Danish episode as an adventure, or a crisis survived, or a serious quest for anythi...

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not towisdom, but to scar tissue and...

The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that...

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ...

There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing...

The perfect weather of Indian Summer lengthened and lingered, warm sunny days were followed by brisk...

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a ...

The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that ...

The creative writer is compulsively concrete . . . . His fictional house should be haunted by ideas,...

Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, i...

What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a...

Hard writing makes easy reading.

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

Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces th...

A poem isn't selfish. It speaks to people.

A poet is somebody who has written a poem.

If you could forget mortality... You could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and ...

[Friendship] is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds ...

What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and n...

Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.

The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called "merely cultural," not even livi...

[Y]ou were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase [angle of repose...

[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, o...

I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sobe...

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

Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered j...

There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance ... some meeting, some intersect...

It's idealistic, it's for love and gentleness, it's close to nature, it hurts nobody, it's voluntary...

You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.

Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.

What do you mean, 'Angle of Repose?' she asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother's...

That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. "It's all right," he said. "But I'd tak...

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

Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its co...

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

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately...

I wouldn't live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn't want it ne...

[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneli...

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

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

Under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of life in the Rocky Mountains there was something exci...

Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels a...

I am deep in my willed habits. From the outside, I suppose I look like an unoccupied house with one ...

It would be easy to call it quits. Occasionally I have these moments, not often. There is nothing to...

It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.

I find it hard to describe what it is like to look fully into eyes that one has known that well--kno...

It was as if she had thought him into existence again, as if her mind were a flask into which had be...

I never learned to say shit before a lady. I don't believe in progress in quite the way you seem to....

After a day and a half or so the traveler will realize that crossing the continent by Interstate he ...

I have always said that the way to deal with the pain of other’s is by sympathy, which is suffering ...

Ruth believes that boys are not found around stables because what they like is taking things apart a...

Walk openly, Marian used to say. Love even the threat and the pain, feel yourself fully alive, cast ...

Marian’s eyes absolutely blaze. To meet them is to have a shock of contact as if they were electrica...

wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as...

Isn’t it complicated to be human, though?” she said. “Animals seem to give up their lives so natural...

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

The forces of blind life that work across this hilltop are as irresistible as she said they were, th...

Oh, listen. Listen!' A sound like a big crowd a good way off, excited and shouting, getting closer. ...

Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don...

I am terribly glad to be alive and when I have wit enough to think about it, terribly proud to be a ...

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention...