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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
Writing
Make
Write
Sense

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

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American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
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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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?
Wallace Stegner
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If the national park is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America has ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea.
Wallace Stegner
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Have a chance to create a society to match its scenery.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
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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Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened.
Wallace Stegner
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We do not write what we know we write what we want to find out.
Wallace Stegner
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it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.
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 are 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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It should not be denied... that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led West.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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We were going to leave a mark on the world but instead the world left marks on us.
Wallace Stegner
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Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
Wallace Stegner
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How much wilderness do the wilderness-lovers want? ask those who would mine and dig and cut and dam in such sanctuary spots as these. The answer is easy: Enough so that there will be in the years ahead a little relief, a little quiet, a little relaxation, for any of our increasing millions who need and want it.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
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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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