Quote

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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Wallace Stegner
Age: 84 †
Born: 1909
Born: February 18
Died: 1993
Died: April 13
Biographer
Environmentalist
Historian
Naturalist
Novelist
Writer
Lake Mills
Iowa
Always
Rocks
Glass
Shook
Gave
River
Thunder
Sunken
Minutes
Glasses
Beside
Sped
Face
Minute
Smooth
Paddling
Faces
Environmental
Watched
Shatter
Water
Rivers
Mountains
Foam
Earth
Mountain
Stood
Roar
Heart
Green
Fascinated
Spray

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

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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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Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.
Wallace Stegner
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No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.
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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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Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.
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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 is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.
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There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.
Wallace Stegner
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Fossil energy is the worst discovery man ever made, and his disruption of the carbon-oxygen cycle is the greatest of his triumphs over nature. Through thinner and thinner air we labor toward our last end, conquerors finally of even the earth chemistry that created us.
Wallace Stegner
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He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.
Wallace Stegner
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American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
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A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.
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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Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.
Wallace Stegner
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This early piece of the morning is mine.
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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We are fossils in the making.
Wallace Stegner
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If you avoid the killer diseases and keep the degenerative ones under control with sensible diet and exercise and whatever chemotherapy you need to stay in balance, you can live nearly forever.
Wallace Stegner
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She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.
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Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake.
Wallace Stegner