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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.

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
Save
Species
Effort
Nature
Might
Great
Chooses
Conservation
Destroy

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The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.
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Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
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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.
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I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.
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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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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 writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.
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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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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.
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It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.
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Expose a child to a particular environment at this susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.
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Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.
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The perfect weather of Indian Summer lengthened and lingered, warm sunny days were followed by brisk nights with Halloween a presentiment in the air.
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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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Every book that anyone sets out on is a voyage of discovery that may discover nothing. Any voyager may be lost at sea, like John Cabot. Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All he can do is encourge the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don'ts of voyaging.
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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.
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Largeness is a lifelong matter. You grow because you are not content not to. You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn't, it's teeth grow long and lock. You grow because you are a grower you're large because you can't stand to be small.
Wallace Stegner
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Values, both those that we approve and those that we don't, have roots as deep as creosote rings, and live as long and grow as slowly
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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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It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.
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