Quote

It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.

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
Wisdom
Aggravated
Best
Imbecility
Live
Persistent
Without
Pretend
Recognize
Rules
Beginning
Choose

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

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wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.
Wallace Stegner
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Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing.
Wallace Stegner
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Every action is an idea before it is an action, and perhaps a feeling before it is an idea, and every idea rests upon other ideas that have preceded it in time.
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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Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.
Wallace Stegner
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Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for.
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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That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.
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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[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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You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
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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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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Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
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.
Wallace Stegner
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American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
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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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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Water is the true wealth in a dry land.
Wallace Stegner