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

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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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I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.
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American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
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A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.
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Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.
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After a day and a half or so the traveler will realize that crossing the continent by Interstate he gets to know the country about as well as a cable messenger knows the sea bottom.
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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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In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.
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This early piece of the morning is mine.
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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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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?
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We are fossils in the making.
Wallace Stegner
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Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?
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Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
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Fossil energy is the worst discovery man ever made, and his disruption of the carbon-oxygen cycle is the greatest of his triumphs over nature. Through thinner and thinner air we labor toward our last end, conquerors finally of even the earth chemistry that created us.
Wallace Stegner
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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.
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it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.
Wallace Stegner
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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
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There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.
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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