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We write to make sense of it all.

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
Make
Write
Sense
Writing

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

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Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.
Wallace Stegner
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Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.
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
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
Wallace Stegner
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It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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We need wilderness preserved-as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds-because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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This early piece of the morning is mine.
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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Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
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