Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wallace Stegner
Age: 84 †
Born: 1909
Born: February 18
Died: 1993
Died: April 13
Biographer
Environmentalist
Historian
Naturalist
Novelist
Writer
Lake Mills
Iowa
Dream
Awake
Curving
Like
Surface
Trout
Memory
Upward
Dreams
Previous
Memories
Floating
Open
Rings
Eyes
Confusion
Eye
Rising

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

Image
[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.
Wallace Stegner
Image
You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
Wallace Stegner
Image
We write to make sense of it all.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Hard writing makes easy reading.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for.
Wallace Stegner
Image
There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.
Wallace Stegner
Image
It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Have a chance to create a society to match its scenery.
Wallace Stegner
Image
We are fossils in the making.
Wallace Stegner
Image
wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.
Wallace Stegner
Image
A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
Every book that anyone sets out on is a voyage of discovery that may discover nothing. Any voyager may be lost at sea, like John Cabot. Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All he can do is encourge the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don'ts of voyaging.
Wallace Stegner