Quote

To try to save for everyone, for the hostile and independent as well as the committed, some of the health that flows down across the green ridges from the skyline, and some of the beauty and spirit that are still available to any resident of the valley who has a moment and the wit to lift up his eyes unto the hills.

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
Flows
Still
Beauty
Available
Hostile
Wells
Eyes
Committed
Valleys
Skyline
Well
Eye
Save
Lift
Skylines
Trying
Moment
Across
Unto
Resident
Everyone
Flow
Wit
Ridges
Spirit
Independent
Lifts
Residents
Moments
Green
Valley
Stills
Health
Hills

More quotes by 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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The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
Wallace Stegner
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One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.
Wallace Stegner
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Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
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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Water is the true wealth in a dry land.
Wallace Stegner
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This early piece of the morning is mine.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.
Wallace Stegner
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It should not be denied... that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led West.
Wallace Stegner
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Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?
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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Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
Wallace Stegner
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It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one. Through friendships, we spark and inspire one another's ambitions.
Wallace Stegner
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Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.
Wallace Stegner
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American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
Wallace Stegner
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We were going to leave a mark on the world but instead the world left marks on us.
Wallace Stegner
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I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow
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