Wallace Stegner
Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.Collection: Wisdom
A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.Collection: Teacher
Hard writing makes easy reading.
We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Children
One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.Collection: Home
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.Collection: Country
The brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks.Collection: Song
We simply need that wild country available to us... For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.Collection: Country
[Friendship] is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare.Collection: Blood
National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.Collection: Ideas
What is such a resource worth? Anything it costs. If we never hike it or step into its shade, if we only drive by occasionally and see the textures of green mountainside change under wind and sun, or the fog move soft feathers down the gulches, or the last sunset on the continent redden the sky beyond the ridge, we have our money's worth. We have been too efficient at destruction; we have left our souls too little space to breathe in. Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Heart
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . .Collection: Zoos
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.Collection: Good Life
Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.Collection: Inspirational
If you're going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.Collection: Might
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.Collection: Long
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.Collection: Garden
Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Law
Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.Collection: Wisdom
Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.Collection: Country
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.Collection: Dream
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.Collection: Notebook
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.Collection: Home
She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.Collection: Mind
The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people of his experience ... The only thing the writer can do is to recombine parts, suppress some characterisitics and emphasize others, put two or three people into one fictional character, and pray the real-life prototypes won't sue.Collection: Real
Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.Collection: Teaching
it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.Collection: Mistake
Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.Collection: Moving
The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.Collection: West
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.Collection: Loyalty
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.Collection: Civilization
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.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: Teaching
I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.Collection: Teach
It is somethingit 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.Collection: Drinking
We are the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.Collection: Nature
The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.Collection: Life
When I was twenty I was in love with words, a wordsmith. I didn't know enough to know when people were letting words get in their way. Now I like the words to disappear, like a transparent curtain.Collection: People
Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?Collection: People
Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.Collection: Writing
In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.Collection: Thinking
Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.Collection: Trying
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.Collection: Men
This early piece of the morning is mine.Collection: Morning
No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.Collection: Past
Expose a child to a particular environment at this susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.Collection: Inspirational
Water is the true wealth in a dry land.Collection: Land