Wallace Stegner Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Pleasant things to hear, though hearing them from him embarrasses me. I soak up the praise but feel obliged to disparage the gift. I believe that most people have some degree of talent for something
forms, colors, words, sounds. Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations too many. Something. — Wallace Stegner

Somehow I should have been able to say how strong and resilient you were, what a patient and abiding and bonding force, the softness that proved in the long run stronger than what it seemed to yield to ... You are at once a lasting presence and an unhealed wound. — Wallace Stegner

She was still developing her sundial theory of art, which would count no hours but the sunny ones. — 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

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

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

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

Their humor is underdog humor, a put-down of what is more powerful than they. — Wallace Stegner

What little strength he had left flowed out of him and was soaked up; his bones and veins and skin held nothing but tiredness and pain. — Wallace Stegner

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

No Eden valid without serpent. — Wallace Stegner

It almost was. With — Wallace Stegner

Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains. — Wallace Stegner

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

Mexico was an interlude of magic between a chapter of defeats and an unturned page. — Wallace Stegner

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

The forces of blind life that work across this hilltop are as irresistible as she said they were, they work by a principle more potent than fission. But I can't look upon them as just life, impartial and eternal and in flux, an unceasing interchange of protein. And I can't find proofs of the crawl toward perfection that she believed in. Maybe what we call evil is only as she told me that first day we met, what conflicts with our interests; but maybe there are such realities as ignorance, selfishness, jealousy, malice, criminal carelessness, and maybe these things are evil no mater whose interests they serve or conflict with. — Wallace Stegner

Wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good. — Wallace Stegner

It's idealistic, it's for love and gentleness, it's close to nature, it hurts nobody, it's voluntary. I can't see anything wrong with any of that.'
'Neither can I. The only trouble is, this commune will be inhabited by and surrounded by members of the human race. — Wallace Stegner

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

When we're young, we take so casually every sacrifice offered by the old. — 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

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

Getting old is like standing in a long, slow line. You wake up out of the shuffle and torpor only at those moments when the line moves you one step closer to the window. — Wallace Stegner

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

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

We're all tougher than we think we are. We're fixed so that almost anything heals. — Wallace Stegner

What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the world? Our hottest arguments were always about how we could contribute. We did not care about the rewards. We were young and earnest. — 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

The writers I admired and still admire were not carpenters, but more like sculptors. Their art was and is a real probing of real and troubling human confusions. — 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

Well, there's so much to read, and I'm so far behind. — Wallace Stegner

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, — 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

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

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

And I would not blame you if you still asked, Why bother to make contact with kindred spirits you never see and may never hear from, who perhaps do not even exist except in your hopes? Why spend ten years in an apprenticeship to fiction only to discover that this society so little values what you do that it won't pay you a living wage for it? — 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

The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark. But Ruth is right. It is something
it 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; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle. (
from The Spectator Bird) — Wallace Stegner

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

I am deep in my willed habits. From the outside, I suppose I look like an unoccupied house with one unconvincing night-light left on. Any burglar could look through my curtains and conclude I am empty. But he would be mistaken. Under that one light unstirred by movement or shadows there is a man at work, and as long as I am at work I am not a candidate for Menlo Park, or that terminal facility they cynically call a convalescent hospital, or a pine box. My habits and the unchanging season sustain me. Evil is what questions and disrupts. — Wallace Stegner

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

Oh, listen. Listen!' A sound like a big crowd a good way off, excited and shouting, getting closer. We stand up and scan the empty sky. Suddenly there they are (the geese), a wavering V headed directly over the hilltop, quite low, beating southward down the central flyway and talking as they pass. We stay quiet suspending our human conversation until their garulity fades and their wavering lines are invisible in the sky.
They have passed over us like an eraser over a blackboard, wiping away whatever was there before they came. — 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

Wisdom is knowing what you can accept. — 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

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

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

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

How to write a story, though ignorant or baffled. You take something that is important to you, something you have brooded about. You try to see it as clearly as you can, and to fix it in a transferable equivalent. All you want in the finished print is the clean statement of the lens, which is yourself, on the subject that has been absorbing your attention. Sure, it's autobiography. Sure, it's fiction. Either way, if you have done it right, it's true. — Wallace Stegner

There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences. — 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

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

Maybe we were the Diggers of literature. — 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 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

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

Mailbox scenes are the dramatic moments of our undramatic life. — 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

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

I hope they have found enough pleasure along the way so that they don't want it ended — 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

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

And so give your uncommon readers a chance to join you in the solidarity of pain and love and the vision of human possibility. But isn't it enough? For lack of the full heart's desire, won't it serve? — Wallace Stegner

For history is a pontoon bridge. Every man walks and works at its building end, and has come as far as he has over the pontoons laid by others he may never have heard of. — Wallace Stegner

Good fortune, contentment, peace, happiness have never been able to deceive me for long. I expected the worst, and I was right. So much for the dream of man. — 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

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

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

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

You must have brought something. Books? I never saw you without a green bag of books. — 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

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

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim's Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn an man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else - pathway to the stars, maybe. I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without benefit of drugs or orgies, have more fun. — Wallace Stegner

He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man — 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

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

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

For complete information about — Wallace Stegner

There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing. — Wallace Stegner

Under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of life in the Rocky Mountains there was something exciting and vital, full of rude poetry: the heartbeat of the West as it fought its way upward toward civilization. — Wallace Stegner

Hard writing makes easy reading. — 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

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

There are further considerations I might raise. How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? What are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, 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 recognizable in fiction? — Wallace Stegner

I never learned to say shit before a lady. I don't believe in progress in quite the way you seem to. You believe in it more than Grandmother did. As for those purely cultural patterns of convention you think I ought to escape from, they happen to add up to civilization, and I'd rather be civilized than tribal or uncouth. — Wallace Stegner

The ferocious virtues that had been necessary for survival on the American frontier were theirs: they were men who lived freely, wastefully, independently, and they lived by killing
animals as a rule, men if necessary. — 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

Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view on earth,.. — Wallace Stegner

We must be reconciled, for what we left behind us can never be ours again. — 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

The Cypress Hills massacre, ... one of the final outrages of the literally lawless West ... came ... along that practical and symbolic divide, between the Canadian system of monopoly trading and the American system of competition, whiskey, bullets, exploitation, and extermination. — 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