Quote

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
Things
Encouragement
Life
Hearts
Including
Lessons
Amount
Calluses
Wisdom
Tissue
Break
Tissues
Heart
Scar

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

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Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.
Wallace Stegner
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Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.
Wallace Stegner
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No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
Wallace Stegner
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There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences
Wallace Stegner
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A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.
Wallace Stegner
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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 of the geography of hope.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.
Wallace Stegner
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We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged and panted it out the whole way.
Wallace Stegner
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If you avoid the killer diseases and keep the degenerative ones under control with sensible diet and exercise and whatever chemotherapy you need to stay in balance, you can live nearly forever.
Wallace Stegner
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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
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Largeness is a lifelong matter - sometimes a conscious goal, sometimes not. You enlarge yourself because that is the kind of individual you are. You grow because you are not content not to.
Wallace Stegner
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The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
Wallace Stegner
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Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.
Wallace Stegner
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There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.
Wallace Stegner
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American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
Wallace Stegner
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Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
Wallace Stegner
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Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.
Wallace Stegner
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I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow
Wallace Stegner
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It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.
Wallace Stegner