Quote

Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.

Wallace Stegner

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wallace Stegner
Age: 84 †
Born: 1909
Born: February 18
Died: 1993
Died: April 13
Biographer
Environmentalist
Historian
Naturalist
Novelist
Writer
Lake Mills
Iowa
Understanding
Accept
Accepting
Wisdom
Knowing

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

Image
A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing.
Wallace Stegner
Image
A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.
Wallace Stegner
Image
I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow
Wallace Stegner
Image
Every book that anyone sets out on is a voyage of discovery that may discover nothing. Any voyager may be lost at sea, like John Cabot. Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All he can do is encourge the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don'ts of voyaging.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Wallace Stegner
Image
History is not the proper midden for digging up novelties. Perhaps that is one reason why a nation bent on novelty ignores it.
Wallace Stegner
Image
If we don't know where we are, we don't know who we are.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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.
Wallace Stegner
Image
I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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.
Wallace Stegner
Image
We write to make sense of it all.
Wallace Stegner
Image
It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.
Wallace Stegner
Image
I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.
Wallace Stegner
Image
[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.
Wallace Stegner
Image
It is somethingit can be everything-to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below.
Wallace Stegner