Quote

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

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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
Never
Advantage
Shortcuts
Anybody
Illegal
Took
Gain
Mistake
Plenty
Around
Judge
Whole
Gains
Jogged
Made
Mistakes
Panted
Way
Judging
Tripped

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Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.
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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.
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We simply need that wild country available to us... For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
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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.
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If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.
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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.
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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.
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Expose a child to a particular environment at this susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.
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A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.
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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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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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Water is the true wealth in a dry land.
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You have to get over the color green you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns you have to get used to an inhuman scale you have to understand geological time.
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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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We are the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.
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It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one. Through friendships, we spark and inspire one another's ambitions.
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The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.
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The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
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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Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.
Wallace Stegner