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

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
Knowing
Understanding
Accept
Accepting
Wisdom

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

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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.
Wallace Stegner
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Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.
Wallace Stegner
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Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake.
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Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.
Wallace Stegner
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The perfect weather of Indian Summer lengthened and lingered, warm sunny days were followed by brisk nights with Halloween a presentiment in the air.
Wallace Stegner
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Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
Wallace Stegner
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You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
Wallace Stegner
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You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
Wallace Stegner
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When I was twenty I was in love with words, a wordsmith. I didn't know enough to know when people were letting words get in their way. Now I like the words to disappear, like a transparent curtain.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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We write to make sense of it all.
Wallace Stegner
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wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.
Wallace Stegner
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The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.
Wallace Stegner