Quotes from Wallace Stegner

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.

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

Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?... Do we all buzz or ring or light up when people press our vanity buttons, and only then? Can I think of anyone in my whole life whom I have liked without his first showing signs of liking me?

You'll do what you think you want to do, or what you think you ought to do. If you're very lucky, luckier than anybody I know, the two will coincide.

Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.

We write to make sense of it all.

One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.

I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow

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.

Our last impression of her as she turned the corner was that smile, flung backward like a handful of flowers.

Wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.

You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.

Hard writing makes easy reading.

Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?

What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the world? Our hottest arguments were always about how we could contribute. We did not care about the rewards. We were young and earnest.

No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.

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 . . .

Well, there's so much to read, and I'm so far behind.

It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.

The perfect weather of Indian Summer lengthened and lingered, warm sunny days were followed by brisk nights with Halloween a presentiment in the air.

In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation became a game.

Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.

You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.

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.