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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wallace Stegner
Age: 84 †
Born: 1909
Born: February 18
Died: 1993
Died: April 13
Biographer
Environmentalist
Historian
Naturalist
Novelist
Writer
Lake Mills
Iowa
Young
Right
Hard
Deprivation
Way
Became
Game
Wife
Games
Beautiful

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

Image
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.
Wallace Stegner
Image
I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.
Wallace Stegner
Image
We are the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.
Wallace Stegner
Image
You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Have a chance to create a society to match its scenery.
Wallace Stegner
Image
[Friendship] is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare.
Wallace Stegner
Image
We are fossils in the making.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Water is the true wealth in a dry land.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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.
Wallace Stegner
Image
We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.
Wallace Stegner
Image
[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.
Wallace Stegner
Image
[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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.
Wallace Stegner
Image
No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
Wallace Stegner
Image
wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.
Wallace Stegner
Image
The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
Wallace Stegner
Image
The brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
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