Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner
Wallace Earle Stegnerwas 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...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth18 February 1909
CountryUnited States of America
Wallace Stegner quotes about
good-life ambition support
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.
divorce home done
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.
notebook morning lying
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.
broken-heart encouragement inspirational-life
Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
essentials individualism belonging
American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
west adaptation process
The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.
humble responsibility men
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.
agreement civilization names
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.
used turns
He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.
sorrow
I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow
fossils
We are fossils in the making.
intimate reader meetings
The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.