Quote

One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples.

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
Means
Stills
Retain
Still
Sanity
Many
Peoples
Mean
Americans
World
Hold
Chance
Natural

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

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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.
Wallace Stegner
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No place is a place until it has found its poet.
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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American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
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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How much wilderness do the wilderness-lovers want? ask those who would mine and dig and cut and dam in such sanctuary spots as these. The answer is easy: Enough so that there will be in the years ahead a little relief, a little quiet, a little relaxation, for any of our increasing millions who need and want it.
Wallace Stegner
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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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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.
Wallace Stegner
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If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.
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
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.
Wallace Stegner
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You achieve stature only by being good enough to deserve it, by forcing even the contemptuous and indifferent to pay attention, and to acknowledge that human relations and human emotions are of inexhaustible interest wherever they occur.
Wallace Stegner
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It is the abiding concern of thinking people to preserve what keeps men human-to save our contact with nature of which we are a part.
Wallace Stegner
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I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow
Wallace Stegner
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Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?... Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me?
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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By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.
Wallace Stegner
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We do not write what we know we write what we want to find out.
Wallace Stegner
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When I was twenty I was in love with words, a wordsmith. I didn't know enough to know when people were letting words get in their way. Now I like the words to disappear, like a transparent curtain.
Wallace Stegner