Quote

If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.

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
Going
Wells
Might
Well

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
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
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
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
Image
Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
Wallace Stegner
Image
We are fossils in the making.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.
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
Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.
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
He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.
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
Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Every action is an idea before it is an action, and perhaps a feeling before it is an idea, and every idea rests upon other ideas that have preceded it in time.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
We were going to leave a mark on the world but instead the world left marks on us.
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