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

Wallace Stegner

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Wallace Stegner
Age: 84 †
Born: 1909
Born: February 18
Died: 1993
Died: April 13
Biographer
Environmentalist
Historian
Naturalist
Novelist
Writer
Lake Mills
Iowa
Break
Tissues
Heart
Scar
Things
Encouragement
Life
Hearts
Including
Lessons
Amount
Calluses
Wisdom
Tissue

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

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When I was twenty I was in love with words, a wordsmith. I didn't know enough to know when people were letting words get in their way. Now I like the words to disappear, like a transparent curtain.
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Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
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You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.
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After a day and a half or so the traveler will realize that crossing the continent by Interstate he gets to know the country about as well as a cable messenger knows the sea bottom.
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It is somethingit can be everything-to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below.
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I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.
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There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.
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it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.
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Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake.
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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
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The life we all live is amateurish and accidental it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.
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Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree.
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[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.
Wallace Stegner
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By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.
Wallace Stegner
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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
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To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.
Wallace Stegner
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We write to make sense of it all.
Wallace Stegner
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Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.
Wallace Stegner
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We do not write what we know we write what we want to find out.
Wallace Stegner
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A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out.
Wallace Stegner