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I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.

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
May

More quotes by 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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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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We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged and panted it out the whole way.
Wallace Stegner
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There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences
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 write to make sense of it all.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
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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Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.
Wallace Stegner
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Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?
Wallace Stegner
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I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.
Wallace Stegner
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No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.
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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A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out.
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.
Wallace Stegner
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We need wilderness preserved-as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds-because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.
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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Expose a child to a particular environment at this susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.
Wallace Stegner
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If we don't know where we are, we don't know who we are.
Wallace Stegner
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You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
Wallace Stegner