Quotes from Wallace Stegner

This place is like the back entrance to a black cow.

This time she was writing the guidebook herself, as she went, and its authority could not be challenged or repudiated.

And I would not blame you if you still asked, Why bother to make contact with kindred spirits you never see and may never hear from, who perhaps do not even exist except in your hopes? Why spend ten years in an apprenticeship to fiction only to discover that this society so little values what you do that it won't pay you a living wage for it?

Chaos is the law of nature; order is the dream of man.

But we all hoped, in whatever way our capacities permitted, to define and illustrate the worthy life. With me it was always to be done in words; Sid too, though with less confidence. With Sally it was sympathy, human understanding, a tenderness toward human cussedness or frailty. And with Charity it was organization, order, action, assistance to the uncertain, and direction to the wavering.

Mailbox scenes are the dramatic moments of our totally undramatic life.

The wicked and the unhappy always stole the show because sin and suffering were the most universal human experiences.

After all, we had been programmed in the same system, stuffed like Strasbourg geese with the best that has been known and said in the world during man's long struggle upward from spontaneity to cliché.

Westerners live outdoors more than people elsewhere because outdoors is mainly what they've got.

Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don't warrant attention as individuals. One of us doesn't differ that much from another, each generation repeats its parents, the works we build to outlast us are not much more enduring than anthills, and much less so than coral reefs.

sitting in Grandmother's old wicker chair and littering my porch with her foolish young life.

Recollection, I have found, is usually about half invention, and

He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man WITH SOMETHING THE MATTER WITH HIM.

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.

As the saying goes, I don't want his blood on the rug.

I was pondering the vanity of human wishes and the desperation of human hope, the tooth of time, the vulnerability of good and the unseen omnipresence of evil, and the frailty and passion of life.

and so give your uncommon readers a chance to join you in the solidarity of pain and love and the vision of human possibility. But isn't it enough? For lack of the full heart's desire, won't it serve?

And my lonely spirit thrills To see the frosty asters like smoke upon the hills?

There is something in October sets the gipsy blood astir. We must rise and follow her Where from every hill aflame She calls and calls each vagabond by name.

What I am sure of is that friendship—not love, friendship—is as possible between women as between men, and that in either case it is often stronger for not having to cross sexual picket lines. Sexuality and mistrust often go together, and both are incompatible with amicitia.

But Judas, now, sitting at the Last Supper trying to disguise his treachery, with that symbolic cat behind him, he was something else because of his human complexity.

I suspect that what make hedonists so angry when they think about overeachievers is that the overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun.

but she's as blunt as a splitting maul." She thinks about that, walking again.

Whatever we thought about art and its relation to life, we knew that the Faulkner motto we had adopted in harder times no longer served. "They kilt us but they ain't whupped us yit" was no watchword for this world so full of interest, instruction, suggestiveness, possibility,