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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
Without
Cherished
Much
Celebrated
Individualism
Belonging
Developed
Essential
Essentials
American
Corrective

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it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.
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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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To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.
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I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.
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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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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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She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.
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Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?
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Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
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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.
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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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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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Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing.
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Largeness is a lifelong matter. You grow because you are not content not to. You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn't, it's teeth grow long and lock. You grow because you are a grower you're large because you can't stand to be small.
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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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If we don't know where we are, we don't know who we are.
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Expose a child to a particular environment at this susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.
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One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples.
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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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