Quote

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.

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
Found
Reciting
Everything
Boast
Fellow
Fellows
Drinking
Bird
Among
Rafters
Fighting
Boasting

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Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
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There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.
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Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.
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[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.
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[Friendship] is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare.
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I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.
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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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No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
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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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To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.
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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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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.
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The life we all live is amateurish and accidental it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.
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I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow
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There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences
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wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.
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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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Hard writing makes easy reading.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
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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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