Quote

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

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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
Yarn
Happened
History
Monuments
Facts
Ballads
Place
Monument
Wells
Legends
Well
Remembered
Yarns
Things
Serve
Fictions
Fiction

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Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.
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Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened.
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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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American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
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There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.
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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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Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.
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We simply need that wild country available to us... For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
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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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I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.
Wallace Stegner
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Have a chance to create a society to match its scenery.
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Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for.
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We need wilderness preserved-as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds-because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.
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Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.
Wallace Stegner
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You'll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you're very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide.
Wallace Stegner
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Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
Wallace Stegner
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It is somethingit can be everything-to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below.
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History is not the proper midden for digging up novelties. Perhaps that is one reason why a nation bent on novelty ignores it.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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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