Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wallace Stegner
Age: 84 †
Born: 1909
Born: February 18
Died: 1993
Died: April 13
Biographer
Environmentalist
Historian
Naturalist
Novelist
Writer
Lake Mills
Iowa
Feeling
Upon
Idea
Action
Feelings
Ideas
Preceded
Every
Rests
Time
Perhaps

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

Image
If we don't know where we are, we don't know who we are.
Wallace Stegner
Image
He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.
Wallace Stegner
Image
There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences
Wallace Stegner
Image
You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.
Wallace Stegner
Image
I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.
Wallace Stegner
Image
I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow
Wallace Stegner
Image
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.
Wallace Stegner
Image
It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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