I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me. Wallace Stegner More Quotes by Wallace Stegner More Quotes From 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 diggingnoveltyreason-why [I]t is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband. Wallace Stegner apologeticwifehusband If we don't know where we are, we don't know who we are. Wallace Stegner who-we-areifsknows 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 menpeoplethinking The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends. Wallace Stegner dubiouserrorslife 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 ambitionwritingschool 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 meanlyingfiction Have a chance to create a society to match its scenery. Wallace Stegner rugged-individualismscenerychance Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow -- haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to -- I'd have more respect for them ... Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade. Wallace Stegner agreementnamescivilization 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 airdiscoverymen To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free. Wallace Stegner valueslittles No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike. Wallace Stegner clockpast 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 luckytwothinking In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth. Wallace Stegner should-havefictionthinking You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me. Wallace Stegner make-outmarried 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 vanitylightthinking One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples. Wallace Stegner chancemeanworld 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 wifegamesbeautiful Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake. Wallace Stegner eyedreammemories 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 healthywestcivilization
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