Quote

History is not the proper midden for digging up novelties. Perhaps that is one reason why a nation bent on novelty ignores it.

Wallace Stegner

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Wallace Stegner
Age: 84 †
Born: 1909
Born: February 18
Died: 1993
Died: April 13
Biographer
Environmentalist
Historian
Naturalist
Novelist
Writer
Lake Mills
Iowa
Perhaps
Nations
Novelties
History
Ignores
Reason
Digging
Novelty
Bent
Proper
Nation

More quotes by Wallace Stegner

Image
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
Image
To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.
Wallace Stegner
Image
We do not write what we know we write what we want to find out.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.
Wallace Stegner
Image
[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.
Wallace Stegner
Image
American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
Wallace Stegner
Image
The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Largeness is a lifelong matter. You grow because you are not content not to. You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn't, it's teeth grow long and lock. You grow because you are a grower you're large because you can't stand to be small.
Wallace Stegner
Image
Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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.
Wallace Stegner
Image
The perfect weather of Indian Summer lengthened and lingered, warm sunny days were followed by brisk nights with Halloween a presentiment in the air.
Wallace Stegner
Image
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
Image
Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.
Wallace Stegner
Image
You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
Wallace Stegner
Image
[I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.
Wallace Stegner
Image
There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.
Wallace Stegner
Image
We are fossils in the making.
Wallace Stegner
Image
No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.
Wallace Stegner
Image
The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.
Wallace Stegner
Image
By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.
Wallace Stegner