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American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.

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
Much
Celebrated
Individualism
Belonging
Developed
Essential
Essentials
American
Corrective
Without
Cherished

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I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.
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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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A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out.
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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.
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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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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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Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?
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In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.
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That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.
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Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
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Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.
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In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.
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We write to make sense of it all.
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Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
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If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.
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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.
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You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.
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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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A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.
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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.
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