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

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A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.
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Hard writing makes easy reading.
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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.
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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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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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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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He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.
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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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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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I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there its roar shook both the earth and me.
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Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?
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Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened.
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Largeness is a lifelong matter. You grow because you are not content not to. You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn't, it's teeth grow long and lock. You grow because you are a grower you're large because you can't stand to be small.
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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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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.
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We write to make sense of it all.
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Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
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In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.
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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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