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There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences

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
Sense
Beautiful
Consequences
Consequence
Scene

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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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Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened.
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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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Every action is an idea before it is an action, and perhaps a feeling before it is an idea, and every idea rests upon other ideas that have preceded it in time.
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In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
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
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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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No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.
Wallace Stegner
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Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.
Wallace Stegner
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Largeness is a lifelong matter - sometimes a conscious goal, sometimes not. You enlarge yourself because that is the kind of individual you are. You grow because you are not content not to.
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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The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?
Wallace Stegner
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She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.
Wallace Stegner