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

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

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Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.
Wallace Stegner
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We are the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.
Wallace Stegner
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Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
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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We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.
Wallace Stegner
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You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
Wallace Stegner
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No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
Wallace Stegner
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He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.
Wallace Stegner
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After a day and a half or so the traveler will realize that crossing the continent by Interstate he gets to know the country about as well as a cable messenger knows the sea bottom.
Wallace Stegner
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It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one. Through friendships, we spark and inspire one another's ambitions.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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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
Wallace Stegner
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Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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I think, don't you, that a girl with any delicacy of feeling couldn't bring herself to marry a man indirectly responsible for her father's death. No matter how much she was in love with him.
Wallace Stegner
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The brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner