Quote

It should not be denied... that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led West.

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
Freedom
Escape
History
Obligation
Mind
Absolutes
Exhilarated
Always
Absolute
Irksome
Road
Obligations
Minds
Associated
West
Denied
Law
Oppression

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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.
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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.
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Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
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The perfect weather of Indian Summer lengthened and lingered, warm sunny days were followed by brisk nights with Halloween a presentiment in the air.
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Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?
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Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
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Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.
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I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.
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Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
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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.
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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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One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples.
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To try to save for everyone, for the hostile and independent as well as the committed, some of the health that flows down across the green ridges from the skyline, and some of the beauty and spirit that are still available to any resident of the valley who has a moment and the wit to lift up his eyes unto the hills.
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If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.
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We write to make sense of it all.
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 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.
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It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one. Through friendships, we spark and inspire one another's ambitions.
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.
Wallace Stegner