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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
Marry
Married
Didn
Make

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You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.
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I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.
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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?
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There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences
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It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.
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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.
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Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.
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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.
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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.
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No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.
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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.
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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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Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?
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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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We do not write what we know we write what we want to find out.
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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We are fossils in the making.
Wallace Stegner
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[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
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Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
Wallace Stegner
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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