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Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner Quotes

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Famous Wallace Stegner Quotes

“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.”

IfsThinkingWayMayArtCharacterLightFormCultureSpeakColorPersonalitySpeechStonesWestClimateWesternMinorsGeographyPyramidsWestern CultureLight And Color
Book:The American West as Living Space
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“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 . . .”

PeopleIfsBookLastsSilenceCasesGoneClearEnvironmentAirTreeMembersCleanSpeciesEnvironmentalForestsDestroyedComicDirtyStreamsWildernessPermitPlasticPollutionCigaretteComic BookConservationVirginsExtinctionOur EnvironmentMother EarthZoosNature And EnvironmentBiodiversitySave Mother EarthForests And TreesNature ConservationClean AirAir And WaterThe Wild NatureEnvironmental PollutionDestroying The EnvironmentPaved RoadsDestroyed Nature
Book:The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner
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“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.”

IfsHumansNamesGrowsSidesIssuesConditionsHavensTomorrowCivilizationQuietDown AndRevolutionaryStreamsAgreementRebelHuman ConditionDeclineDesperationStagnantQuiet Desperation
Author:Wallace Stegner
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“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.”

IfsDoneHomeFeltKnownWonderToo MuchDivorceComing BackConsumedTransportationShallownessHome Place
Author:Wallace Stegner
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“[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.”

IfsYearsBookDoneFeelingsSchoolLastsFallLeftMistakeAirFootballSummerPagesCleanObligationPassingPassingsHatsAutumnVacationLast YearSeptemberGatheringAnnualsSchool DaysJubilee
Author:Wallace Stegner
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“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.”

PeopleIfsWorldIndividualNatureNaturalChanceGoneEnvironmentTreeRocksDestroyedSoilWildernessNatural WorldCompetentVertical
Book:The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner
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“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.”

PeopleIfsNeedsLooksKindMeanStillsCountryCharacterLeftChallengesGoneCreaturesEdgesAvailableDestroyedWildernessSanityGeographyReassuring
Author:Wallace Stegner
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“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.”

IfsGivingLittlesHas BeensSoulLastsMovingLeftNaturalSpaceStepsSunSkyWindCostResourcesDestructionGreenBreatheSunsetShadeSanityEfficientContinentsFogFeathersFragmentsTextureRidges
Author:Wallace Stegner
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“Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers. If they arrive at college with literary ambitions, they should be told that everything they have done since their first childhood poems, printed in the school paper, has been preparation for entering a long, long apprenticeship.”

IfsThinkingShouldWritingFirstsLongHas BeensDoneSchoolYoungChildhoodCollegePaperAmbitionPreparationEnteringDiscouragedPrintedBe EncouragedYoung WritersApprenticeship
Author:Wallace Stegner
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“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.”

IfsKnowsWayFirstsLittlesDoeRunningUsedTurnsTreeStreetsDelightSmellBreatheStoresGhostFamiliarUsed To BeMy WayGreekStreamsParksVillageSplitsBananasUnfamiliarCokeMuddyMain StreetBanana Splits
Book:Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier
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“... I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?”

IfsLifeDoeHas BeensRealityCenturyPerspectiveWallExerciseShadowPaintCastsCaughtObjectivesWhat IfSunlightRainbowEntityMultipleRemarksVanishingPrismsObjective RealityVanishing PointMultiple Perspectives
Book:The Spectator Bird
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