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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wallace Stegner
Age: 84 †
Born: 1909
Born: February 18
Died: 1993
Died: April 13
Biographer
Environmentalist
Historian
Naturalist
Novelist
Writer
Lake Mills
Iowa
Gardens
Beauty
Understand
Quit
Used
Scale
Time
Quitting
Associating
Scales
Geological
Garden
Lawns
Green
Inhuman
Color

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

Image
A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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.
Wallace Stegner
Image
I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?
Wallace Stegner
Image
Hard writing makes easy reading.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
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
Image
By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.
Wallace Stegner
Image
The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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.
Wallace Stegner
Image
it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
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.
Wallace Stegner
Image
In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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