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

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Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.
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Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.
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Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing.
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I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.
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No place is a place until it has found its poet.
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You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.
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How much wilderness do the wilderness-lovers want? ask those who would mine and dig and cut and dam in such sanctuary spots as these. The answer is easy: Enough so that there will be in the years ahead a little relief, a little quiet, a little relaxation, for any of our increasing millions who need and want it.
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You achieve stature only by being good enough to deserve it, by forcing even the contemptuous and indifferent to pay attention, and to acknowledge that human relations and human emotions are of inexhaustible interest wherever they occur.
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Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
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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.
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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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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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A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.
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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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Fossil energy is the worst discovery man ever made, and his disruption of the carbon-oxygen cycle is the greatest of his triumphs over nature. Through thinner and thinner air we labor toward our last end, conquerors finally of even the earth chemistry that created us.
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The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
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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.
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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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She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.
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That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.
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