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

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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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Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.
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She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.
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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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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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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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Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.
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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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I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.
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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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A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.
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Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
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Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
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I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.
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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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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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Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
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Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.
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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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