110+ Wallace Stegner Quotes On West, Realistic And Nature

Wallace Stegner was an American novelist and short story writer. He is best known for his novels set in the American West, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Angle of Repose. Stegner was also a noted environmentalist and conservationist, and was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1980. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Wallace Stegner on west, realistic, nature.

Top 10 Wallace Stegner Quotes

1. National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.
5. Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.
6. Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.
7. American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
8. Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
9. If the national park is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America has ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea.
10. wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.

Wallace Stegner Short Quotes

• If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.
• Water is the true wealth in a dry land.
• A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.
• [I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband.
• Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.
• A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.
• Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.
• You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
• We do not write what we know; we write what we want to find out.
• If we don't know where we are, we don't know who we are.

Wallace Stegner Quotes About West

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

The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process. — Wallace Stegner

I was shaped by the west and have lived most of my life in it, and nothing would gratify me more than to see it in all its subregions and subcultures both prosperous and environmentally healthy, with a civilization to match its scenery. — Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner Quotes About Nature

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. — Wallace Stegner

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. — 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

One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples. — 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

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

Wallace Stegner Quotes About History

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts. — 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

No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide. — Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner Quotes About Life

It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one. Through friendships, we spark and inspire one another's ambitions. — Wallace Stegner

The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends. — Wallace Stegner

No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike. — Wallace Stegner

I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow — 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. I know what he means, and I agree. — Wallace Stegner

Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to. — Wallace Stegner

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

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

Wallace Stegner Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

[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

I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and me. — 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

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

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. — Wallace Stegner

There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters. — 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

Every book that anyone sets out on is a voyage of discovery that may discover nothing. Any voyager may be lost at sea, like John Cabot. Nobody can teach the geography of the undiscovered. All he can do is encourge the will to explore, plus impress upon the inexperienced a few of the dos and don'ts of voyaging. — 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

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

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

How much wilderness do the wilderness-lovers want? ask those who would mine and dig and cut and dam in such sanctuary spots as these. The answer is easy: Enough so that there will be in the years ahead a little relief, a little quiet, a little relaxation, for any of our increasing millions who need and want it. — 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

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

Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it. — 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

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. — 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

No place is a place until it has found its poet. — 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

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

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

I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across. — Wallace Stegner

I am terribly glad to be alive; and when I have wit enough to think about it, terribly proud to be a man and an American, with all the rights and privileges that those words connote; and most of all I am humble before the responsibilities that are also mine. For no right comes without a responsibility, and being born luckier than most of the world's millions, I am also born more obligated. — Wallace Stegner

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

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . . — Wallace Stegner

The brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks. — Wallace Stegner

It is somethingit can be everything-to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below. — Wallace Stegner

That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm. — Wallace Stegner

A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out. — Wallace Stegner

I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me. — Wallace Stegner

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

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

There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance, said the Ellen Ward of my dream, that woman I hate and fear. I am sure she meant 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. — Wallace Stegner

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

Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting? — Wallace Stegner

We write to make sense of it all. — Wallace Stegner

He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best. — Wallace Stegner

... I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others? — Wallace Stegner

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

You'll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you're very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide. — Wallace Stegner

Hard writing makes easy reading. — 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

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

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

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

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places. — Wallace Stegner

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. — Wallace Stegner

There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic. — Wallace Stegner

Have a chance to create a society to match its scenery. — Wallace Stegner

A western buckaroo, I share his scorn for people who go camping by the book, relying on the authority of some half-assed assistant scoutmaster whose total experience outdoors probably consists of two overnight hikes and a weekend in the Catskills. But we have just had that confrontation. The one who goes by Pritchard's book is Sid's wife, and I am wary. It is not my expedition. I am a guest here. — Wallace Stegner

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

Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept. — Wallace Stegner

it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers. — Wallace Stegner

Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable. — Wallace Stegner

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game. — Wallace Stegner

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

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. — Wallace Stegner

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

To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free. — Wallace Stegner

This early piece of the morning is mine. — Wallace Stegner

She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into. — Wallace Stegner

Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened. — Wallace Stegner

You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength. — Wallace Stegner

Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. — Wallace Stegner

We are fossils in the making. — Wallace Stegner

The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private. — Wallace Stegner

It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation. — Wallace Stegner

Every action is an idea before it is an action, and perhaps a feeling before it is an idea, and every idea rests upon other ideas that have preceded it in time. — 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 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

Life Lessons by Wallace Stegner

1. Wallace Stegner's work emphasizes the importance of preserving the environment and recognizing the connections between people and the natural world.
2. He also stresses the importance of understanding and respecting different cultures and the value of community.
3. Finally, Stegner encourages readers to take risks and pursue their dreams, no matter how difficult the journey may be.