Wallace Stegner quotes

The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. (Wallace Stegner)
There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences. View quote
Wallace Stegner
If the national park idea is the best idea America ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea. View quote
Wallace Stegner
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. View quote
Wallace Stegner
Wisdom... is knowing what you have to accept. View quote
Wallace Stegner
It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is chooserules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any. View quote
Wallace Stegner
He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best. View quote
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. View quote
Wallace Stegner
You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength. View quote
Wallace Stegner
A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter. View quote
Wallace Stegner
Hard writing makes easy reading. (Wallace Stegner)
wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good. View quote
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. View quote
Wallace Stegner
No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike. View quote
Wallace Stegner
It is a better world with some buffalo left in it, a richer world with some gorgeous canyons unmarred by signboards, hot-dog stands, super highways, or high-tension lines, undrowned by power or irrigation reservoirs. If we preserved as parks only those places that have no economic possibilities, we would have no parks. And in the decades to come, it will not be only the buffalo and the trumpeter swan who need sanctuaries. Our own species is going to need them too. It needs them now. View quote
Wallace Stegner
It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs. View quote
Wallace Stegner
The national park idea, the best idea we ever had, was inevitable as soon as Americans learned to confront the wild continent not with fear and cupidity but with delight, wonder, and awe. View quote
Wallace Stegner
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. View quote
Wallace Stegner
it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers. View quote
Wallace Stegner
Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime's worth of lessons. View quote
Wallace Stegner
She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into. (Wallace Stegner)
We write to make sense of it all. View quote
Wallace Stegner
Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness. View quote
Wallace Stegner
Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable. View quote
Wallace Stegner
I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow. View quote
Wallace Stegner