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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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Wallace Stegner
Age: 84 †
Born: 1909
Born: February 18
Died: 1993
Died: April 13
Biographer
Environmentalist
Historian
Naturalist
Novelist
Writer
Lake Mills
Iowa
American
Rather
Idea
Parks
Best
Reflect
Ideas
National
Ever
Democratic
Absolutely
Worst

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

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Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.
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Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.
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[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.
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We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged and panted it out the whole way.
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Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.
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Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?
Wallace Stegner
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History is not the proper midden for digging up novelties. Perhaps that is one reason why a nation bent on novelty ignores it.
Wallace Stegner
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No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
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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Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.
Wallace Stegner
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The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.
Wallace Stegner
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Expose a child to a particular environment at this susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.
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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[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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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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Largeness is a lifelong matter - sometimes a conscious goal, sometimes not. You enlarge yourself because that is the kind of individual you are. You grow because you are not content not to.
Wallace Stegner
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You achieve stature only by being good enough to deserve it, by forcing even the contemptuous and indifferent to pay attention, and to acknowledge that human relations and human emotions are of inexhaustible interest wherever they occur.
Wallace Stegner
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Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
Wallace Stegner
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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
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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