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

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

Image
Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.
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
Image
Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.
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
No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.
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
I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?
Wallace Stegner
Image
Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
Wallace Stegner
Image
She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.
Wallace Stegner
Image
It is somethingit can be everything-to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?
Wallace Stegner
Image
There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.
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
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
Image
We are fossils in the making.
Wallace Stegner