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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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Wallace Stegner
Age: 84 †
Born: 1909
Born: February 18
Died: 1993
Died: April 13
Biographer
Environmentalist
Historian
Naturalist
Novelist
Writer
Lake Mills
Iowa
Needs
Simply
Hope
Reassuring
Means
Geography
Nature
Sanity
Part
Wilderness
Need
Wild
Country
Available
Mean
Creatures

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Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
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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.
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Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
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American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
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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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It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one. Through friendships, we spark and inspire one another's ambitions.
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Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.
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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.
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The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.
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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.
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Largeness is a lifelong matter. You grow because you are not content not to. You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn't, it's teeth grow long and lock. You grow because you are a grower you're large because you can't stand to be small.
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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.
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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.
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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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You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
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There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.
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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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I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow
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Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?
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National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.
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