Quotes from Wallace Stegner

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 shall be richer all my life for this sorrow

The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.

I am impressed by how much of my grandparent's life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.

Every action is an idea before it is an action, and perhaps a feeling before it is an idea, and every idea rests upon other ideas that have preceded it in time.

Hard writing makes easy reading.

In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.

When I was twenty I was in love with words, a wordsmith. I didn't know enough to know when people were letting words get in their way. Now I like the words to disappear, like a transparent curtain.

I think, don't you, that a girl with any delicacy of feeling couldn't bring herself to marry a man indirectly responsible for her father's death. No matter how much she was in love with him.

I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.

Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.

One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples.

Have a chance to create a society to match its scenery.

Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.

If you avoid the killer diseases and keep the degenerative ones under control with sensible diet and exercise and whatever chemotherapy you need to stay in balance, you can live nearly forever.

Thanks to the growing strength of environmental organizations, there will always be some back country to provide us with a touch of wonder and a breath of fresh air.

Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.

It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.