Quote

You have to get over the color green you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns you have to get used to an inhuman scale you have to understand geological time.

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
Green
Lawns
Color
Inhuman
Beauty
Gardens
Understand
Quit
Used
Scale
Time
Quitting
Scales
Associating
Garden
Geological

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No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.
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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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That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.
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Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened.
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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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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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We are fossils in the making.
Wallace Stegner
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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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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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it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.
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The brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks.
Wallace Stegner
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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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The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
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Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.
Wallace Stegner
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I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.
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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I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there its roar shook both the earth and me.
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National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.
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