Quote

Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree.

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
Mean
Fiction
Chekhov
Says
Endings
Lying
Beginnings
Lives
Conform
Means
Tempted
Stories
Conventions
Human
Seldom
Humans
Agree

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There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.
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This early piece of the morning is mine.
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[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.
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American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
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Values, both those that we approve and those that we don't, have roots as deep as creosote rings, and live as long and grow as slowly
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A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.
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Hard writing makes easy reading.
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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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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.
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You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.
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it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.
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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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In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.
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Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.
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The life we all live is amateurish and accidental it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.
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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.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
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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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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.
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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