Top Wallace Stegner Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Wallace Stegner Biography

Wallace Stegner

Wallace Earle Stegner (February 18, 1909 – April 13, 1993) was an American novelist, short story writer, environmentalist, and historian, often called "The Dean of Western Writers". He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977.

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Wallace Stegner Quotes

We were going to leave a mark on the world but instead the world left marks on us.

World, Mark, Left, Instead, Marks

Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.

Book, Convention, Death, Keepers, Pain

I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow

Life, Richer, Sorrow

You married me. . . but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.

Make, Make Out, Married, Marry

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.

Aggravated, Persistent, Pretend, Recognize, Rules, Want

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.

Agreement, Civilization, Desperation, Issues, Rebels, Society

Values, both those that we approve and those that we don't, have roots as deep as creosote rings, and live as long and grow as slowly

Approve, Creosote, Deep, Grows, Long, Roots

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.

Beautiful, Games, Hard, Right, Wife

Have a chance to create a society to match its scenery.

Chance, Match, Rugged Individualism, Scenery, Society

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.

Fiction, Human, Lie, Lying, Mean, Says

A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.

Cutting, Heart, Organism, Writing

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.

Dried, Jars, Past, Rose, Store, Summer

A muddy little stream, a village grown unfamiliar with time and trees. I turn around and retrace my way up Main Street and park and have a Coke in the confectionery store. It is run by a Greek, as it used to be, but whether the same Greek or another I would not know. He does not recognize me, nor I him. Only the smell of his place is familiar, syrupy with old delights, as if the ghost of my first banana split had come close to breathe on me.

Coke, Delights, Running, Smell, Tree, Trees

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.

Believe, Lying, Morning, Notebook, Poured, Whole

There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance. . . some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.

Brain, Discover, Hopeful, Lack, Lifelong, Two

American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.

American, Belonging, Corrective, Developed, Essentials, Individualism

You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.

Color, Garden, Green, Scale, Understand

You achieve stature only by being good enough to deserve it, by forcing even the contemptuous and indifferent to pay attention, and to acknowledge that human relations and human emotions are of inexhaustible interest wherever they occur.

Achieve, Attention, Emotion, Good, Pay, Relations

A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out.

Animal, Circulating, Cutting, Defined, Heart

I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.

Know, Knows, May, Who I Am

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