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Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.

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
Ahead
Possibility
Fact
Hope
Facts
Reality
Always
Obscured
Outlines

More quotes by 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.
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If we don't know where we are, we don't know who we are.
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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.
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We were going to leave a mark on the world but instead the world left marks on us.
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A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.
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I was shaped by the west and have lived most of my life in it, and nothing would gratify me more than to see it in all its subregions and subcultures both prosperous and environmentally healthy, with a civilization to match its scenery.
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That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.
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Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
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This early piece of the morning is mine.
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It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.
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Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.
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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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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.
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In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.
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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.
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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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No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.
Wallace Stegner
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There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences
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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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American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
Wallace Stegner