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The brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks.

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
Lose
Loses
Song
Would
Brook
Brooks
Removed
Rocks

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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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Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.
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American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
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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.
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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.
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Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.
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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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Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?
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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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Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
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I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.
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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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Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
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I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow
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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.
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I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.
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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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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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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.
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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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