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Thanks to the growing strength of environmental organizations, there will always be some back country to provide us with a touch of wonder and a breath of fresh air.

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
Country
Touch
Always
Organization
Organizations
Air
Fresh
Strength
Breath
Land
Breaths
Wonder
Thanks
Growing
Provide
Back
Environmental

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There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.
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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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There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?
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Every book that anyone sets out on is a voyage of discovery that may discover nothing. Any voyager may be lost at sea, like John Cabot. Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All he can do is encourge the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don'ts of voyaging.
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It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.
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We were going to leave a mark on the world but instead the world left marks on us.
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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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When I was twenty I was in love with words, a wordsmith. I didn't know enough to know when people were letting words get in their way. Now I like the words to disappear, like a transparent curtain.
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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.
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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.
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We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged and panted it out the whole way.
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[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.
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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.
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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.
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If we don't know where we are, we don't know who we are.
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