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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
Belonging
Developed
Essential
Essentials
American
Corrective
Without
Cherished
Much
Celebrated
Individualism

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In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.
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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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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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Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
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Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?
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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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She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.
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To try to save for everyone, for the hostile and independent as well as the committed, some of the health that flows down across the green ridges from the skyline, and some of the beauty and spirit that are still available to any resident of the valley who has a moment and the wit to lift up his eyes unto the hills.
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You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
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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.
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Fossil energy is the worst discovery man ever made, and his disruption of the carbon-oxygen cycle is the greatest of his triumphs over nature. Through thinner and thinner air we labor toward our last end, conquerors finally of even the earth chemistry that created us.
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We write to make sense of it all.
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I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.
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Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.
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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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Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
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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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If we don't know where we are, we don't know who we are.
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One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.
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Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.
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