Quotes from Wallace Stegner

It was as if she had thought him into existence again, as if her mind were a flask into which had been poured a measure of longing, a measure of discontent, a measure of fatigue, a dash of bitterness, and pouf, there he stood.

Satisfying natural desires is fine, but natural desires have a way of being both competitive and consequential.

Anyone who reads, even one from the remote Southwest at the far end of an attenuated tradition, is to some extent a citizen of the world, and I had been a hungry reader all my life.

Children from a big family have the benefit of a certain amount of neglect.

I find it hard to describe what it is like to look fully into eyes that one has known that well--known better than one knows the look of one's own eyes, actually--and then put away, deliberately forgotten. That instantly reasserted intimacy, that resumption of what looks like friendly concern, is like nakedness, like exposure.

Order is indeed the dream of man, but chaos, which is only another word for dumb, blind, witless chance, is still the law of nature.

There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.

How do I know what I think till I see what I say?

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.

There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences.

Survival, it is called. Often it is accidental, sometimes it is engineered by creatures or forces that we have no conception of, always it is temporary.

Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything - though it might have been a good thing if he'd also taught her to question the act of questioning.

To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.

I had stopped my chair at that exact place, coming out, because right there the spice of wisteria that hung around the house was invaded by the freshness of apple blossoms in a blend that lifted the top of my head. As between those who notice such things and those who don't, I prefer those who do.

I can't see that Danish episode as an adventure, or a crisis survived, or a serious quest for anything definable. It was just another happening like today's luncheon, something I got into and got out of. And it reminds me too much of how little life changes: how, without dramatic events or high resolves, without tragedy, without even pathos, a reasonably endowed, reasonably well-intentioned man can walk through the world's great kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry.

Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?

I have heard of people's lives being changed by a dramatic or traumatic event--a death, a divorce, a winning lottery ticket, a failed exam. I never heard of anybody's life but ours being changed by a dinner party.

I hope they have found enough pleasure along the way so that they don't want it ended

Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best subject matter for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a by-product, something the reader himself is led to formulate after watching the story unfold. The ideas, the generalizations, ought to be implicit in the selection and arrangement of the people and places and actions. They ought to haunt a piece of fiction as a ghost flits past an attic window after dark.

The clear lesson of New England's history is that when there are not enough suitable men around to run the world, women are perfectly capable of doing so.

It is not queer, and both desolating and comforting, how, with all associations broken, one forms new ones, as a broken bone thickens in healing.

Ruth believes that boys are not found around stables because what they like is taking things apart and putting them together again, and for this purpose horses are not so satisfactory as cars, motorcycles, and even bicycles, while girls adore horses because they are biological and have functions.

Leave a mark on the world. Instead, the world has left marks on us. We got older. Life chastened us so that now we lie waiting to die, or walk on canes, or sit on porches where once the young juices flowed strongly, and feel old and inept and confused.

We must be reconciled, for what we left behind us can never be ours again.