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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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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.
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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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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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It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.
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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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Every action is an idea before it is an action, and perhaps a feeling before it is an idea, and every idea rests upon other ideas that have preceded it in time.
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In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.
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To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.
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It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.
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If we don't know where we are, we don't know who we are.
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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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Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?... Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me?
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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 an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.
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Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree.
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To try to save for everyone, for the hostile and independent as well as the committed, some of the health that flows down across the green ridges from the skyline, and some of the beauty and spirit that are still available to any resident of the valley who has a moment and the wit to lift up his eyes unto the hills.
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Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.
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[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.
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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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I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.
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