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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
Ever
Wilderness
National
Highest
Lord
Refinement
Idea
Suggested
America
Preservation
Best
Park
Ideas
Parks
More quotes by Wallace Stegner
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
Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.
Wallace Stegner
I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow
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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
To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.
Wallace Stegner
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
The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
Wallace Stegner
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
A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.
Wallace Stegner
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
Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
Wallace Stegner
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
Every book that anyone sets out on is a voyage of discovery that may discover nothing. Any voyager may be lost at sea, like John Cabot. Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All he can do is encourge the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don'ts of voyaging.
Wallace Stegner
In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.
Wallace Stegner
There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.
Wallace Stegner
He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.
Wallace Stegner
Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.
Wallace Stegner
By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.
Wallace Stegner
Have a chance to create a society to match its scenery.
Wallace Stegner
Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.
Wallace Stegner