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If the national park is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America has ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea.

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
America
Preservation
Best
Park
Ideas
Parks
Ever
Wilderness
National
Highest
Lord
Refinement
Idea
Suggested

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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.
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American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
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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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The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
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I was shaped by the west and have lived most of my life in it, and nothing would gratify me more than to see it in all its subregions and subcultures both prosperous and environmentally healthy, with a civilization to match its scenery.
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Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened.
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wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.
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I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.
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You'll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you're very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide.
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A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.
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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.
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It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.
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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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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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Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
Wallace Stegner
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Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.
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.
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Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?... Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me?
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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.
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He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.
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