"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."
— Wallace Stegner

"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 (Crossing to Safety)

"Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend."
— Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)

"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

"If Henry Adams, whom you knew slightly, could make a theory of history by applying the second law of thermodynamics to human affairs, I ought to be entitled to base one on the angle of repose, and may yet. There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you -- a train, say, or the future -- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute the speed of history? Like all falling bodies, it constantly accelerates. But I would like to hear your life as you heard it, coming at you, instead of hearing it as I do, a sober sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne. I don't find your life uninteresting, as Rodman does. I would like to hear it as it sounded while it was passing. Having no future of my own, why shouldn't I look forward to yours."
— Wallace Stegner

"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 (Crossing to Safety)

"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

"Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?"
— Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)

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

"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 (Crossing to Safety)

"I hope they have found enough pleasure along the way so that they don't want it ended"
— Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)

"No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide."
— Wallace Stegner (Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier)

"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 (Angle of Repose)

"it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers."
— Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)

"There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic."
— Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)

"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

"Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend."
— Wallace Stegner

"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

"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

"Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch the button and wait for the print-out. Mine is more like a Japanese library of the old style, without a card file or an indexing system or any systematic shelf plan. Nobody knows where anything is except the old geezer in felt slippers who has been shuffling up and down those stacks for sixty-nine years. When you hand him a problem he doesn't come back with a cartful and dump it before you, a jackpot of instant retrieval. He finds one thing, which reminds him of another, which leads him off to the annex, which directs him to the east wing, which sends him back two tiers from where he started. Bit by bit he finds you what you want, but like his boss who seems to be under pressure to examine his life, he takes his time."
— Wallace Stegner (The Spectator Bird)

"Anyone pretending to be a guide through wild and fabulous territory should know the territory. I wish I knew it better than I do. I am not Jed Smith. But Jed smith is not available these days as a guide, and I am. I accept the duty, at least as much for what I may learn as for what I may be able to tell others."
— Wallace Stegner

"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 pured 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 (Crossing to Safety)

"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."
— Wallace Stegner (Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier)

"A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out."
— Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)

"Actually I am pretty pregnant with the news Sid brought me, but glad we have not spread it. The girls look very happy. With their heads bound up in babushkas they might be out of the peasant chorus of a Russian opera. Any minute now we will sing and dance to the balalaika. Charity is tall and striking; Sally smaller, darker, quieter. One dazzles, the other warms. In a couple of hours I will need sympathy, but for now I like being washed by the wind."
— Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)

"A western buckaroo, I share his scorn for people who go camping by the book, relying on the authority of some half-assed assistant scoutmaster whose total experience outdoors probably consists of two overnight hikes and a weekend in the Catskills. But we have just had that confrontation. The one who goes by Pritchard's book is Sid's wife, and I am wary. It is not my expedition. I am a guest here."
— Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)

"Ruth believes that boys are not found around stables because what they like is taking things apart and putting them together again, and for this purpose horses are not so satisfactory as cars, motorcycles, and even bicycles, while girls adore horses because they are biological and have functions."
— Wallace Stegner (All the Little Live Things)

"Maybe we were the Diggers of literature."
— Wallace Stegner (Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West)

""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 (The American West as Living Space)

"If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c , anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me. I may even have contributed to it in minor ways, for culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone.
"
— Wallace Stegner (The American West as Living Space)

"I honestly believe that the counsel I gave Curt was mainly sound, and I don't think too much of it was holier-than-thou. I tried to give him a code to live by. He wanted not one scrap of it, he didn't agree with a single value that I held."
— Wallace Stegner (All the Little Live Things)

"What should one do? If Ruth had any better luck with him I would have thought that he simply had to attach himself to antifatherly gods until he proved himself a man in his own terms...She followed him to the bottom of his burrow, trying to understand, she forgave him incessantly, she was the pacifying force when he and I clashed. And he went out of his way to treat her with even greater impatience and contempt than he treated me. His wretched treatment of his mother was one of the commonest sources of our quarrels. Sometimes I wondered if he didn't abuse her because she tended to take his side - he wanted no mediator between us."
— Wallace Stegner (All the Little Live Things)

"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 (All the Little Live Things)

"Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable."
— Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose)

"He looks into his Dixie cup and looks back up as if surprised at what he found there. The future, maybe."
— Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)