Quotes from Wallace Stegner

Imprisoned in reiterative seasons, vacillating between hope and disappointment, they were kept from being the vigorous doers that their nature and their culture instructed them to be.

What i want to speak for is not so much the wilderness uses...but the wilderness idea, which is a resource in itself. Being an intangible and spiritual resource, it will be seem mystical to the practical-minded- bu then anything that cannot be moved by a bulldozer is likely to seem mystical to them.

There hadn't really been any decision. As she dragged the round-topped trunk up the steps and propped its lid against the table, she was thinking that you never really made up your mind to anything. You simply bent where the pressure was greatest. You didn't surrender, because surrender was annihilation, but you gave before the pressure.

In all honesty, what I believe is neither inspirational nor evangelical. Passionate faith I am suspicious of because it hangs witches and burns heretics, and generally I am more in sympathy with the witches and heretics than with the sectarians who hang and burn them. I fear immoderate zeal, Christian, Muslim, Communist, or whatever, because it restricts the range of human understanding and the wise reconciliation of human differences, and creates an orthodoxy with a sword in its hand.

There are several dubious assumptions about the early West. One is that it was the home of intractable self-reliance amounting to anarchy, whereas in fact large parts of it were owned by Eastern and foreign capital and run by iron-fisted bosses.

The outsider never gets over its heightened and romantic notions of the West. The West never gets over its heightened and romantic notions of itself.

harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge or taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.

Morning, the room full of sun. I wheel to the window and watch the robins digging worms in Grandfather's lawn. The grass is blue-wet in the open, green-dry under the pines. 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.

We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.

There is something ominous about a swift river, and something thrilling about a river of any kind. The nearest upstream bend is a gate out of mystery, the nearest downstream bend a door to further mystery.

Dutton describes a process of westernization of the perceptions that has to happen before the West is beautiful to us. You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.

I really only want to say that we may love a place and still be dangerous to it.

We can't tell who first had an idea; we can only tell who first had it influentially, who formulated it in a striking way and left it in some form, poem or equation or picture, that others could stumble upon with the shock of recognition. The radical ideas that have been changing our attitudes toward our habitat have been around forever.

girl of eighteen named Elsa Norgaard,

We hate ourselves...We hate our own failures and our own weaknesses. We hate ourselves because we cannot help comparing what we are with what we might be. Our discontent is the voice of God in us, prodding us to live up to ourselves. Until we recognize and admit this we will always turn savagely outward, destroying other things because ourselves are at fault.

Early in the anti-Vietnam War movement, Stegner marched with the students, but later, when the demonstrations turned violent, he was revolted and couldn't understand how breaking all the windows on the Stanford campus could bring an end to the war.

This is not a journal", he wrote, "it is not notes for a novel, not a line-a-day record of the trivia my mind dredges up. Call it an attempt to understand." (Bruce) -Wallace Stegner (The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Pg. 436)

I must accept the justice of death and the injustice of more "life"; I had no right to remain a single hour.

You break experience up into pieces, and you put them together in different combinations, new combinations, and some are real and some are not, some are documentary and some are imagined.... It takes a pedestrian and literal mind to be worried about which is true and which is not true. It's all of it not true, and it's all of it true.

Some Heisenberg principle frustrates critics who try to analyze how stories are written. Whatever they can analyze has to be dead before it can be dissected.

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.

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

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.