Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards. Wallace Stegner More Quotes by Wallace Stegner More Quotes From 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 divorce done home She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into. Wallace Stegner mind looks rooms Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others ... an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands ... hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact. Wallace Stegner loyalty lying hands Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept. Wallace Stegner understanding knowing wisdom Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness. Wallace Stegner youth age 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 headquarters best-times home 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 responsibility humble men Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. Wallace Stegner broken-heart inspirational-life encouragement 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 notebook morning lying 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 national-parks america ideas Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend. Wallace Stegner notion appreciate home ... 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 wall exercise life wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good. Wallace Stegner evil-love paradise evil Homesickness is a great teacher. It taught me, during an endless rainy fall, that I came from the arid lands, and like where I came from. I was used to dry clarity and sharpness in the air. I was used to horizons that either lifted into jagged ranges or rimmed the geometrical circle of the flat world. I was used to seeing a long way. I was used to earth colors--tan, rusty red, toned white--and the endless green of Iowa offended me. I was used to a sun that came up over mountains and went down behind other mountains. I missed the color and smell of sagebrush, and the sight of bare ground. Wallace Stegner sight teacher fall The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process. Wallace Stegner adaptation west process Hard writing makes easy reading. Wallace Stegner reading easy writing 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 locks teeth long [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 summer mistake football Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened. Wallace Stegner taught crafts talent 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 rocks nature people
