Wallace Stegner Quotes

But however you might rebel, there was no shedding them. They were your responsibility and there was no one to relieve you of them. They called you Sis. All your life people called you Sis, because that was what you were, or what you became - big sister, helpful sister, the one upon whom everyone depended, the one they all came to for everything from help with homework to a sliver under the fingernail. ~ Wallace Stegner

The air is so crisp it gives me a brief, delusive sense of health and youth.
those I don't have but I have learned not to scorn the substitutes: quiet, plenty of time, and a job to spend it on. ~ Wallace Stegner

Wisdom is knowing what you can accept. ~ Wallace Stegner

I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me. ~ 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

[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. ~ Wallace Stegner

Satisfying natural desires is fine, but natural desires have a way of being both competitive and consequential. ~ Wallace Stegner

American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging. ~ Wallace Stegner

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery. ~ Wallace Stegner

How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction? ~ Wallace Stegner

As moonlight unto sunlight is that desert sage to other greens. ~ Wallace Stegner

I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow ~ Wallace Stegner

It is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers. ~ Wallace Stegner

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

Isn't it complicated to be human, though?" she said. "Animals seem to give up their lives so naturally…And after all, I grew up, I married John, I had Debby. So knowing, being able to understand and forecast and even predict an approximate date, shouldn't make any difference. I guess consciousness makes individuals of us, and as individuals we lose the old acceptance…"
"The one thing," Marian said in a voice that went suddenly small and tight, "the thing I can hardly bear sometimes is that I won't ever see her grow up. She'll have to do it without whatever I could have given her."
"Time, too, time and everything that one could do in it, and the chance of wasting or losing or never even realizing it. It's so important to us because we see it so close. We're individuals, we're full of ourselves, and so we're bad historians. We get crazy and anxious because all of sudden there's so little time left to be loving and generous as we wish we'd always been and always intended to be…do you suppose I feel the shortness of time because I want to experience everything and feel everything that the race has ever felt? Because there's so much to feel and I'm greedy? ~ Wallace Stegner

I have to blame myself for not finding any way of reaching him, but I can't feel that either Ruth or I had anything much to do with his corruption.
His personal motives were freedom and pleasure, and he misread them both. ~ Wallace Stegner

He has a way of walking through conventions of that kind as if they did not exist, and being so much himself that pretty soon people begin adapting themselves to him. ~ Wallace Stegner

Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals? We're all decent godless people, Hallie. Let's not be too hard on each other if we don't set the world afire. There's already been enough of that. ~ Wallace Stegner

That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. "It's all right," he said. "But I'd take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That's about used up, I should think. ~ Wallace Stegner

We were going to leave a mark on the world but instead the world left marks on us. ~ Wallace Stegner

She will burn bright until she goes out; she will go on standing on tiptoe till she falls. ~ Wallace Stegner

In this room hung with the trophies of culture, her story sounded melodramatic and rough. She felt like a squaw explaining how you tanned a deerskin by working brains into the bloody hide and then chewing it all over until it was soft. ~ Wallace Stegner

We are fossils in the making. ~ Wallace Stegner

Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn't struck you. ~ Wallace Stegner

A poem isn't selfish. It speaks to people. ~ Wallace Stegner

Yet now, having held in grief and resentment, and evaded thinking too much about the episode that changed my life with the finality of an axe, here I am exalted by having made use of it, by having spilled my guts in public. We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most. ~ 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

I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships. ~ Wallace Stegner

Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything - though it might have been a good thing if he'd also taught her to question the act of questioning. ~ Wallace Stegner

[Wild animals], and the beautiful landscapes that sustain them ... possess a value and a virtue regardless of our dwindling connection with them. It seems that there is a virtue and a wisdom in keeping some things beyond our reach: that the protection of wilderness itself is imperative ... We have touched, and are consuming, everything. The world is very old, and we are so new. I like the feeling of awe
what the late writer Wallace Stegner called 'the birth of awe'
in beholding wild country not reduced by man. I like to remember that it is wild country that gives rise to wild animals; and that the marvelous specificity of wild animals reminds us to wake up, to let our senses be inflamed by every scent and sound and sight and taste and touch of the world. I like to remember that we are not here forever, and not here alone, and that the respect with which we behold the wild world matters, if anything does. ~ Rick Bass

A wandering dog of a night wind came in off the sagebrush mesa carrying a bar of band music, and laid it on her doorstep like a bone. ~ Wallace Stegner

I'm not writing a book of Western history,' I tell him. 'I've written enough history books to know this isn't one. I'm writing about something else. A marriage, I guess. Deadwood was just a blank space in the marriage. Why waste time on it?'
Rodman is surprised. So am I, actually - I have never formulated precisely what it is I have been doing, but the minute I say it I know I have said it right. What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That's where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any. ~ Wallace Stegner

She was so old, she would have had to be dated by carbon 14. ~ Wallace Stegner

Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality. ~ Wallace Stegner

Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he's far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can't afford self-doubt and he can't let other people's opinions, even a father's, keep him from writing. ~ Wallace Stegner

And so, by circuitous and unpredictable routes, we converge toward midcontinent and meet in Madison, and are at once drawn together, braided and plaited into a friendship. It 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. To Sally and me, focused on each other and on the problems of getting on in a rough world, it happened unexpectedly; and in all our lives it has happened so thoroughly only once. ~ Wallace Stegner

What if I can't turn my head? I can look in any direction by turning my wheelchair, and I choose to look back. Rodman to the contrary notwithstanding, that is the only direction we can learn from. ~ Wallace Stegner

It is the abiding concern of thinking people to preserve what keeps men human-to save our contact with nature of which we are a part. ~ Wallace Stegner

I have heard of people's lives being changed by a dramatic or traumatic event
a death, a divorce, a winning lottery ticket, a failed exam. I never heard of anybody's life but ours being changed by a dinner party. ~ Wallace Stegner

After all, what are any of us after but the conviction of belonging? ~ Wallace Stegner

We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [ ... ]
My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings. ~ Wallace Stegner

The light is nostalgic about mornings past and optimistic about mornings to come. ~ Wallace Stegner

Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best subject matter for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a by-product, something the reader himself is led to formulate after watching the story unfold. The ideas, the generalizations, ought to be implicit in the selection and arrangement of the people and places and actions. They ought to haunt a piece of fiction as a ghost flits past an attic window after dark. ~ Wallace Stegner

We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged and panted it out the whole way. ~ Wallace Stegner

There is one thing above all others that I despise. It is fingers, especially female fingers, messing around in my guts. My guts, like Victorian marriage, are private. ~ Wallace Stegner

Nothing is so safe as habit, even when habit is faked. ~ Wallace Stegner

To try to save for everyone, for the hostile and independent as well as the committed, some of the health that flows down across the green ridges from the skyline, and some of the beauty and spirit that are still available to any resident of the valley who has a moment and the wit to lift up his eyes unto the hills. ~ Wallace Stegner

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

Habit is my true, my wedded wife. ~ Wallace Stegner

You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine. ~ Wallace Stegner

There is no way to step off the tread mill. It is all treadmill. ~ Wallace Stegner

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. ~ Wallace Stegner

He still wore, in the warming barracks, a muskrat cap with earlaps. Under it his eyes were gray as agates, as sudden as an elbow in the solar plexus. ~ Wallace Stegner

It almost was. With ~ Wallace Stegner

It is hard doctrine, but I was beginning to understand it then, and I have not repudiated it till now: that love, not sin, costs us Eden. Love is a carrier of death - the only thing, in fact, that makes death significant. ~ Wallace Stegner

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 ~ Wallace Stegner

In that latitude the midsummer days were long, midsummer nights only a short darkness between the long twilight that postponed the stars and the green dawn clarity that sponged them up. ~ Wallace Stegner

There is something about all beards that is like the gesture of thumbing the nose. Thank you very much. Up yours. ~ Wallace Stegner

Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary. ~ Wallace Stegner

You hear what the dean said about Jesus Christ? 'Sure He's a good teacher, but what's He published? ~ Wallace Stegner

The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called "merely cultural," not even living in the traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived! ~ Wallace Stegner

I find it hard to describe what it is like to look fully into eyes that one has known that well
known better than one knows the look of one's own eyes, actually
and then put away, deliberately forgotten. That instantly reasserted intimacy, that resumption of what looks like friendly concern, is like nakedness, like exposure. ~ Wallace Stegner

I know no way of discounting the doctrine that when you take something you want, and damn the consequences, then you had better be ready to accept whatever consequences ensue. ~ Wallace Stegner

I had stopped my chair at that exact place, coming out, because right there the spice of wisteria that hung around the house was invaded by the freshness of apple blossoms in a blend that lifted the top of my head. As between those who notice such things and those who don't, I prefer those who do. ~ Wallace Stegner

There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance ... some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone. ~ Wallace Stegner

Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness. ~ Wallace Stegner

I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from. ~ Wallace Stegner

There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis. ~ Wallace Stegner

Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer. ~ Wallace Stegner

I'm tired of hearing that the Lord shapes the back to the burden. ~ Wallace Stegner

If you wanted something, you planned for it, worked for it, and made it happen. ~ Wallace Stegner

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

A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter. ~ Wallace Stegner

For complete information about ~ Wallace Stegner

Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what? ~ Wallace Stegner

Expose a child to a particular environment at this susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies. ~ Wallace Stegner

Before I can say I am, I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was, whatever you and Leah may think. I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were
inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones (that part unfortunate), plus transmitted prejudices, culture, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors that I defend as if they were personal and not familial. ~ Wallace Stegner

Every time. You know why? I want to fail. I work like a dog for twenty years so I'll have the supreme pleasure of failing. Never knew anybody like that, did you? I'm very cunning. I plan it in advance. I fool myself right up to the last minute, and then the time comes and I know how cunningly I've been planning it all the time. I've been a failure all my life. ~ Wallace Stegner

I imagine you will always be pinched for money, for time, for a place to work. But I think you will do it. And believe me, it is not a new problem. You are in good company ... Your touch is the uncommon touch; you will speak only to the thoughtful reader. And more times than once you will ask yourself whether such readers really exist at all and why you should go on projecting your words into silence like an old crazy actor playing the part of himself to an empty theater. ~ Wallace Stegner

Where do I belong in this country? Where is home? ~ Wallace Stegner

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? ~ Wallace Stegner

It reminds me too much of how little life changes: how, without dramatic events or high resolves, without tragedy, without even pathos, a reasonably endowed, reasonable well-intentioned man can walk through the world's great kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry. ~ Wallace Stegner

It happens that I despise that locution, "having sex," which describes something a good deal more mechanical than making love and a good deal less fun than fucking. ~ Wallace Stegner

It was as if she had thought him into existence again, as if her mind were a flask into which had been poured a measure of longing, a measure of discontent, a measure of fatigue, a dash of bitterness, and pouf, there he stood. ~ Wallace Stegner

The mountains of the Great Divide are not, as everyone knows, born treeless, though we always think of them as above timberline with the eternal snows on their heads. They wade up through ancient forests and plunge into canyons tangled up with water-courses and pause in little gem-like valleys and march attended by loud winds across the high plateaus, but all such incidents of the lower world they leave behind them when they begin to strip for the skies: like the Holy Ones of old, they go up alone and barren of all circumstance to meet their transfiguration. ~ Wallace Stegner

A muddy little stream, a village grown unfamiliar with time and trees. I turn around and retrace my way up Main Street and park and have a Coke in the confectionery store. It is run by a Greek, as it used to be, but whether the same Greek or another I would not know. He does not recognize me, nor I him. Only the smell of his place is familiar, syrupy with old delights, as if the ghost of my first banana split had come close to breathe on me. ~ Wallace Stegner

Marian's eyes absolutely blaze. To meet them is to have a shock of contact as if they were electrically charged. Now you see? You wondered what was in whale's milk. Don't you know now? The same thing that's in a mushroom spore so small you need a microscope to see it, or in gophers, or poison oak, or anything else we try to pave under or grub out, or poison. There isn't good life and bad life, there's only life. Think of the force down there, just telling things to get born! ~ Wallace Stegner

The only life we know well, the one on which we are the ultimate authority, is our own. The only experience to which we can bear witness is that which we have personally endured and observed. ~ Wallace Stegner

This place is like the back entrance to a black cow. ~ Wallace Stegner

People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren't any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was; he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities.
...
She shut her mind on that too. There was danger in looking at people as lines. The past spread backward and you saw things in perspective that you hadn't seen then, and that made the future ominous, more ominous than if you just looked at the point, at the moment. There might be truth in what Bruce said, but there was not much comfort. ~ Wallace Stegner

It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks. ~ Wallace Stegner

The wicked and the unhappy always stole the show because sin and suffering were the most universal human experiences. ~ 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

What the disorderly crave above everything is order, what the dislocated aspire to is location. ~ Wallace Stegner

No Eden valid without serpent. ~ Wallace Stegner

If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c , anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me. I may even have contributed to it in minor ways, for culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone.
~ Wallace Stegner

You can't be close to the mortality of friends without being brought to think of your own. ~ Wallace Stegner

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

Though I have been busy, perhaps overbusy, all my life, it seems to me now that I have accomplished little that matters, that the books have never come up to what was in my head, and that the rewards - the comfortable income, the public notice, the literary prizes, and the honorary degrees - have been tinsel, not what a grown man should be content with. ~ Wallace Stegner

And though creative writing as an intellectual exercise may be pursued with profit by anyone, writing as a profession is not a job for amateurs, dilettantes, part-time thinkers, 25-watt feelers, the lazy, the insensitive, or the imitative. It is for the creative, and creativity implies both talent and hard work. ~ Wallace Stegner