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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
Mark
Instead
Leave
Left
Going
World
Marks

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

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He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.
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A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.
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It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.
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Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
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A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out.
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The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.
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I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.
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Largeness is a lifelong matter - sometimes a conscious goal, sometimes not. You enlarge yourself because that is the kind of individual you are. You grow because you are not content not to.
Wallace Stegner
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If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.
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Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
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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.
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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.
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When I was twenty I was in love with words, a wordsmith. I didn't know enough to know when people were letting words get in their way. Now I like the words to disappear, like a transparent curtain.
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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.
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That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.
Wallace Stegner
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I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.
Wallace Stegner
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wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.
Wallace Stegner
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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
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Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?
Wallace Stegner
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I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow
Wallace Stegner