Wallace Stegner > Quotes

“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, The Sound of Mountain Water

“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

“Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to
wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird

“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

“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, All the Little Live Things

“it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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

“The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird

“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, Crossing to Safety

“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, Angle of Repose

“He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.”
― Wallace Stegner

“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, Angle of Repose

“She has had no role in my life except to keep me sane, fed, housed, amused, and protected from unwanted telephone calls, also to restrain me fairly frequently from making a horse's ass of myself in public, to force me to attend to books and ideas from which she knows I will learn something; also to mend my wounds when I am misused by the world, to implant ideas in my head and stir the soil around them, to keep me from falling into a comfortable torpor, to agitate my sleeping hours with problems that I would not otherwise attend to; also to remind me constantly (not by precept but by example) how fortunate I have been to live for fifty-three years with a woman that bright, alert, charming, and supportive.”
― Wallace Stegner

“We write to make sense of it all.”
― 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

“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.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water

“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

“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

“No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.”
― Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow

“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.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“...you must have brought something. Books? I never saw you without a green bag of books.”
― Wallace Stegner

“Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.”
― 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

“Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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, Crossing to Safety

“Nothing is so safe as habit, even when habit is faked.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.”
― Wallace Stegner, Mormon Country

“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

“Satisfying natural desires is fine, but natural desires have a way of being both competitive and consequential.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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, Angle of Repose

“Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.”
― Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things

“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

“You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged and panted it out the whole way.”
― 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

“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

“Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are and makes us recognize ourselves in fiction?”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best subject matter for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a by-product, something the reader himself is led to formulate after watching the story unfold. The ideas, the generalizations, ought to be implicit in the selection and arrangement of the people and places and actions. They ought to haunt a piece of fiction as a ghost flits past an attic window after dark.”
― Wallace Stegner, On Teaching and Writing Fiction

“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 somber sound of expectations reduced, desires blunted, hopes deferred or abandoned, chances lost, defeats accepted, griefs borne.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“We are fossils in the making.”
― Wallace Stegner

“There is one thing above all others that I despise. It is fingers, especially female fingers, messing around in my guts. My guts, like Victorian marriage, are private.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose