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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
Says
Endings
Lying
Beginnings
Lives
Conform
Means
Tempted
Stories
Conventions
Human
Seldom
Humans
Agree
Mean
Fiction
Chekhov
More quotes by Wallace Stegner
That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.
Wallace Stegner
If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.
Wallace Stegner
If you avoid the killer diseases and keep the degenerative ones under control with sensible diet and exercise and whatever chemotherapy you need to stay in balance, you can live nearly forever.
Wallace Stegner
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
The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
Wallace Stegner
Thanks to the growing strength of environmental organizations, there will always be some back country to provide us with a touch of wonder and a breath of fresh air.
Wallace Stegner
Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened.
Wallace Stegner
[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.
Wallace Stegner
She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.
Wallace Stegner
We do not write what we know we write what we want to find out.
Wallace Stegner
There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.
Wallace Stegner
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.
Wallace Stegner
Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.
Wallace Stegner
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.
Wallace Stegner
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
We are the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.
Wallace Stegner
We need wilderness preserved-as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds-because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.
Wallace Stegner
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.
Wallace Stegner
Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.
Wallace Stegner
One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples.
Wallace Stegner