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How much wilderness do the wilderness-lovers want? ask those who would mine and dig and cut and dam in such sanctuary spots as these. The answer is easy: Enough so that there will be in the years ahead a little relief, a little quiet, a little relaxation, for any of our increasing millions who need and want 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
Much
Millions
Ahead
Years
Asks
Lovers
Dams
Would
Easy
Mines
Sanctuary
Littles
Mine
Relaxation
Little
Answer
Increasing
Need
Quiet
Wilderness
Enough
Cutting
Spots
Needs
Answers
Relief

More quotes by 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 ... 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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Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
Wallace Stegner
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Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
Wallace Stegner
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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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We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also 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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[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
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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
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Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.
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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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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One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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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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Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.
Wallace Stegner
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Thanks to the growing strength of environmental organizations, there will always be some back country to provide us with a touch of wonder and a breath of fresh air.
Wallace Stegner
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Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.
Wallace Stegner
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A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.
Wallace Stegner