Quote

He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.

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
Like
Turn
Probably
Turns
Tell
Used
Best

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

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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.
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.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
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
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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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[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
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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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That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.
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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The brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks.
Wallace Stegner
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I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.
Wallace Stegner
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[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
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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Thanks to the growing strength of environmental organizations, there will always be some back country to provide us with a touch of wonder and a breath of fresh air.
Wallace Stegner
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You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.
Wallace Stegner
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In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.
Wallace Stegner
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Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner