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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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Wallace Stegner
Age: 84 †
Born: 1909
Born: February 18
Died: 1993
Died: April 13
Biographer
Environmentalist
Historian
Naturalist
Novelist
Writer
Lake Mills
Iowa
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Find
Writing

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

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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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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
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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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We write to make sense of it all.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.
Wallace Stegner
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Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?
Wallace Stegner
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Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.
Wallace Stegner
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The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.
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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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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That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.
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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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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Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
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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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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Hard writing makes easy reading.
Wallace Stegner
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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
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We simply need that wild country available to us... For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.
Wallace Stegner