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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.

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
Trials
Accidents
Amateurish
Begins
Dubious
Errors
Proceeds
Toward
Accidental
Ends
Trial
Live
Accident
Life
Error

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I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.
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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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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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National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.
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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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it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.
Wallace Stegner
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I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there its roar shook both the earth and me.
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[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.
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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I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow
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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
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You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.
Wallace Stegner
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Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.
Wallace Stegner
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In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.
Wallace Stegner
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Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.
Wallace Stegner
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Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?
Wallace Stegner
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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.
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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Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened.
Wallace Stegner
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The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
Wallace Stegner