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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
Marks
Mark
Instead
Leave
Left
Going
World

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

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It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one. Through friendships, we spark and inspire one another's ambitions.
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You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.
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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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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.
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There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences
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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
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Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.
Wallace Stegner
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Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.
Wallace Stegner
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You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
Wallace Stegner
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History is not the proper midden for digging up novelties. Perhaps that is one reason why a nation bent on novelty ignores it.
Wallace Stegner
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No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.
Wallace Stegner
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Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.
Wallace Stegner
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It should not be denied... that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led West.
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.
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It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.
Wallace Stegner
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One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.
Wallace Stegner
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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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She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.
Wallace Stegner
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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
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[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.
Wallace Stegner