Quote

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.

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
Games
Beautiful
Young
Right
Hard
Deprivation
Way
Became
Game
Wife

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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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I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow
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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.
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We do not write what we know we write what we want to find out.
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Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.
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Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.
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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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[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.
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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.
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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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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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I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.
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You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.
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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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Every book that anyone sets out on is a voyage of discovery that may discover nothing. Any voyager may be lost at sea, like John Cabot. Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All he can do is encourge the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don'ts of voyaging.
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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.
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Every action is an idea before it is an action, and perhaps a feeling before it is an idea, and every idea rests upon other ideas that have preceded it in time.
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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.
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Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.
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