Quote

Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?... Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me?

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
Firsts
Liked
Showing
Without
Friendship
Respond
First
Seem
Rings
Reactive
Whole
Anyone
Vanity
Buzz
Think
Interesting
Presses
Liking
Thinking
Light
Basis
Buttons
Life
Seems
Press
Signs
People
Find
Bases
Ring

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

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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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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.
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A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.
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.
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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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There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences
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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
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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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You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
Wallace Stegner
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I was shaped by the west and have lived most of my life in it, and nothing would gratify me more than to see it in all its subregions and subcultures both prosperous and environmentally healthy, with a civilization to match its scenery.
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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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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.
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.
Wallace Stegner
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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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I think, don't you, that a girl with any delicacy of feeling couldn't bring herself to marry a man indirectly responsible for her father's death. No matter how much she was in love with him.
Wallace Stegner
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Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?
Wallace Stegner
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Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.
Wallace Stegner
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No place is a place until it has found its poet.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
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