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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

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It is the abiding concern of thinking people to preserve what keeps men human-to save our contact with nature of which we are a part.
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You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
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No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
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That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.
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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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You achieve stature only by being good enough to deserve it, by forcing even the contemptuous and indifferent to pay attention, and to acknowledge that human relations and human emotions are of inexhaustible interest wherever they occur.
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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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I think, don't you, that a girl with any delicacy of feeling couldn't bring herself to marry a man indirectly responsible for her father's death. No matter how much she was in love with him.
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Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.
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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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In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.
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I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.
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Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.
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This early piece of the morning is mine.
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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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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.
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Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
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You have to get over the color green you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns you have to get used to an inhuman scale you have to understand geological time.
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Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.
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American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
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