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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.

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
Reason
Institutions
Writing
Constant
Fiction
Impossible
Almost
Mormons
Call
Mormon
Society
Peculiar
Write
Explanation

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I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.
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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.
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We do not write what we know we write what we want to find out.
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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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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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One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.
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[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.
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One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples.
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The life we all live is amateurish and accidental it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.
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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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The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.
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We are fossils in the making.
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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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Values, both those that we approve and those that we don't, have roots as deep as creosote rings, and live as long and grow as slowly
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