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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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Wallace Stegner
Age: 84 †
Born: 1909
Born: February 18
Died: 1993
Died: April 13
Biographer
Environmentalist
Historian
Naturalist
Novelist
Writer
Lake Mills
Iowa
Didn
Make
Marry
Married

More quotes by 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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Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.
Wallace Stegner
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It is the abiding concern of thinking people to preserve what keeps men human-to save our contact with nature of which we are a part.
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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We write to make sense of it all.
Wallace Stegner
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I think, don't you, that a girl with any delicacy of feeling couldn't bring herself to marry a man indirectly responsible for her father's death. No matter how much she was in love with him.
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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I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.
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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Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.
Wallace Stegner
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This early piece of the morning is mine.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
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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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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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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Hard writing makes easy reading.
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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The brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks.
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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Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.
Wallace Stegner