Quote

After a day and a half or so the traveler will realize that crossing the continent by Interstate he gets to know the country about as well as a cable messenger knows the sea bottom.

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
Gets
Cable
Realizing
Cables
Half
Continent
Wells
Traveler
Interstate
Well
Continents
Messenger
Country
Bottom
Crossing
Sea
Crossings
Realize
Messengers

More quotes by 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
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
Image
It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.
Wallace Stegner
Image
The brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks.
Wallace Stegner
Image
I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.
Wallace Stegner
Image
One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing.
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
Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Have a chance to create a society to match its scenery.
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
In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.
Wallace Stegner