Quotes from Wallace Stegner

As a practitioner of hindsight I know that Grandfather was trying to do, by personal initiative and with the financial resources of a small and struggling corporation, what only the immense power of the federal government ultimately proved able to do. That does not mean he was foolish or mistaken. He was premature. His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn't yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid.

And at some immeasurably remote time beyond human caring the whole uneasy region might sink again beneath the sea and begin the cycle all over again by the slow deposition of new marls, shales, limestones, sandstones, deltaic conglomerates, perhaps with a fossil poet pressed and silicified between the leaves of rock. It

Occasionally one meets a Mormon with the knack of putting swear-words together, and sometimes one encounters a speck of interestingly-local profanity in the milk of Mormon human-kindness. I have not heard elsewhere the typical Mormon "I'll be go to Hell," and I have never found even in learned treatises the characteristic "Bear's Ass!" with which a native of Cache Valley expresses disgust.

The irony is that the novel with its Pulitzer and its controversy has brought more attention to Mary Hallock Foote than she would ever have received otherwise.

angle of repose," which means the angle at which dirt and pebbles stop rolling.

For somehow, against probability, some sort of indigenous, recognizable culture has been growing on western ranches and in western towns and even in western cities. It is the product not of the boomers but of the stickers, not of those who pillage and run but of those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.

Be open, be available, be exposed, be skinless. Skinless? Dance around in your bones.

The driver of an automobile on a lonely road is a set of perceptions mounted in the forehead of a mechanical monster.

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.

This early piece of the morning is mine.

We simply need that wild country available to us... For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

We are the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.

It is the abiding concern of thinking people to preserve what keeps men human-to save our contact with nature of which we are a part.

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.

History is not the proper midden for digging up novelties. Perhaps that is one reason why a nation bent on novelty ignores it.

There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.

Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.

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

Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime's worth of lessons.

Expose a child to a particular environment at this susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.

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.

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.

Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.

A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.