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

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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
Part
Single
Competent
Ever
Tree
Wilderness
Something
Environment
Belong
Never
Gone
Soil
World
Chance
Separate
People
Natural
Trees
Individual
Destroyed
Vertical
Nature
Rocks
Remaining

More quotes by 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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If we don't know where we are, we don't know who we are.
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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To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.
Wallace Stegner
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[Friendship] is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare.
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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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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It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.
Wallace Stegner
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Values, both those that we approve and those that we don't, have roots as deep as creosote rings, and live as long and grow as slowly
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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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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There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences
Wallace Stegner
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Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?
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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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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We simply need that wild country available to us... For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
Wallace Stegner
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Hard writing makes easy reading.
Wallace Stegner
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The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
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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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.
Wallace Stegner