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

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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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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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The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
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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.
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I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.
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She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.
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Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
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American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
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No place is a place until it has found its poet.
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We were going to leave a mark on the world but instead the world left marks on us.
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I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.
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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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Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?
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History is not the proper midden for digging up novelties. Perhaps that is one reason why a nation bent on novelty ignores it.
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Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.
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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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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.
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If you avoid the killer diseases and keep the degenerative ones under control with sensible diet and exercise and whatever chemotherapy you need to stay in balance, you can live nearly forever.
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You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.
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