Quote

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
Rather
Idea
Parks
Reflect
Best
National
Ideas
Democratic
Ever
Absolutely
Worst
American

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A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.
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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.
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I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.
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Values, both those that we approve and those that we don't, have roots as deep as creosote rings, and live as long and grow as slowly
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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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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.
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You have to get over the color green you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns you have to get used to an inhuman scale you have to understand geological time.
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It is somethingit can be everything-to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below.
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Water is the true wealth in a dry land.
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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.
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Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.
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I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.
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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.
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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.
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Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.
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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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Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
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A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.
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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.
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Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
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