Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wallace Stegner
Age: 84 †
Born: 1909
Born: February 18
Died: 1993
Died: April 13
Biographer
Environmentalist
Historian
Naturalist
Novelist
Writer
Lake Mills
Iowa
People
Natural
Trees
Individual
Destroyed
Vertical
Nature
Rocks
Remaining
Part
Single
Competent
Ever
Tree
Wilderness
Something
Environment
Belong
Never
Gone
Soil
World
Chance
Separate

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

Image
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
Image
No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.
Wallace Stegner
Image
We are fossils in the making.
Wallace Stegner
Image
The brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks.
Wallace Stegner
Image
I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened.
Wallace Stegner
Image
We were going to leave a mark on the world but instead the world left marks on us.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.
Wallace Stegner
Image
I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
[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
Image
Largeness is a lifelong matter - sometimes a conscious goal, sometimes not. You enlarge yourself because that is the kind of individual you are. You grow because you are not content not to.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
We write to make sense of it all.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
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