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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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Wallace Stegner
Age: 84 †
Born: 1909
Born: February 18
Died: 1993
Died: April 13
Biographer
Environmentalist
Historian
Naturalist
Novelist
Writer
Lake Mills
Iowa
Left
Going
World
Marks
Mark
Instead
Leave
More quotes by Wallace Stegner
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
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
Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened.
Wallace Stegner
Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.
Wallace Stegner
If you avoid the killer diseases and keep the degenerative ones under control with sensible diet and exercise and whatever chemotherapy you need to stay in balance, you can live nearly forever.
Wallace Stegner
Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?
Wallace Stegner
[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.
Wallace Stegner
Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.
Wallace Stegner
The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.
Wallace Stegner
It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.
Wallace Stegner
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
[Friendship] is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare.
Wallace Stegner
A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out.
Wallace Stegner
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
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
National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.
Wallace Stegner
I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.
Wallace Stegner
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
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
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
