Quote

When I was twenty I was in love with words, a wordsmith. I didn't know enough to know when people were letting words get in their way. Now I like the words to disappear, like a transparent curtain.

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
People
Disappear
Twenties
Words
Didn
Curtain
Enough
Curtains
Way
Transparent
Love
Letting
Like
Twenty

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Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.
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We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.
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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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[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.
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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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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.
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American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
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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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To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.
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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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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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That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.
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You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
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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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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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No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.
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Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?
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Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake.
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I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow
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