18+ William Kittredge Quotes On Education, Success

William Kittredge is an American writer and essayist. He is a professor emeritus of English and creative writing at the University of Montana. He is best known for his short stories, essays, and memoirs that explore the rural life of the American West. Following is our collection on famous quotes by William Kittredge on education, leadership, life.

In learning to pay respectful attention to one another and plants and animals, we relearn the acts of empathy, and thus humility and compassion - ways of proceeding that grow more and more necessary as the world crowds in. — William Kittredge

It is our duty to preserve huge tracts of land in something resembling its native condition. The biological interactions necessary to insure the continuities of life are astonishingly complex, and cannot take place in islands of semiwilderness like the national parks. — William Kittredge

A man ... needs to get out in the open air and sweat and blow off the stink. — William Kittredge

The specific danger is us; we are rampant; this earth is our only friend; we are destroying it increment by increment at a horrific rate. We must understand that we can't buy it back. — William Kittredge

Writing is a funny business. You sit in your room and listen to voices and write everything down. What kind of a profession is that? — William Kittredge

It is a skill we learn early, the art of inventing stories to explain away the fearful scared strangeness of the world. Storytelling and make-believe, like war and agriculture, are among the arts of self-defense, and all of them are ways of enclosing otherness and claiming ownership. — William Kittredge

Our old pilgrims believed stories in which the West was a promise, a place where decent people could escape the wreckage of failed lives and start over. Come along, the dream whispers, and you can have another chance. We still listen to promises in the wind. This time, we think, we’ll get it right. — William Kittredge

I had discovered a terrible vulnerability I myself which I think of not as cowardliness but as an ability to imagine too much. — William Kittredge

The ecology of the valley was complex beyond our understanding, and it began to die as we went on manipulating it in ever more frantic ways. As it went dead and empty of the old life it became a place where no one wanted to live. In our right minds we want to seek out places that reek of complexity. Our drive to industrialize soured and undercut the intimacies that drew most people to country life in the first place. — William Kittredge

Places come to exist in our imaginations because of stories, and so do we. When we reach for a "sense of place," we posit an intimate relationship to a set of stories connected to a particular location, such as Hong Kong or the Grand Canyon or the bed where we were born, thinking of histories and the evolution of personalities in a local context. Having "a sense of self" means possessing a set of stories about who we are and with whom and why. — William Kittredge

We tell stories to talk out the trouble in our lives, trouble otherwise so often so unspeakable. It is one of our main ways of making our lives sensible. Trying to live without stories can make us crazy. They help us recognize what we believe to be most valuable in the world, and help us identify what we hold demonic. — William Kittredge

They knew bullshit, and they knew about the ruling class; dying for a ruling class cause was almost always bullshit. — William Kittredge

In a story, nothing is real until it is acted upon. — William Kittredge

One of finest evocations of life in Western America in recent memory... Powerful and profoundly moving. — William Kittredge

What I wanted was some dreamlike Frank Lloyd Wright bungalow where we could sit on the veranda forever and it would always be twilight in the temperate zones, in the most beautiful house. — William Kittredge

We continually use stories to hold up as mirrors to ourselves. — William Kittredge

Don't worry about meaning. If a story's any good, it can't help but have meaning. Let the PhDs tell you what your story means. — William Kittredge

We live in stories. What we are is stories. We do things because of what is called character, and our character is formed by the stories we learn to live in. — William Kittredge

Life Lessons by William Kittredge

1. William Kittredge's work emphasizes the importance of understanding and appreciating the natural world, as well as the need to protect it from exploitation.
2. He also encourages readers to reflect on their own relationships with the land and to consider how their actions might affect the environment.
3. Through his writing, Kittredge encourages readers to appreciate the beauty of the natural world and to take responsibility for its preservation.