Quotes from Wallace Stegner

Getting old is like standing in a long, slow line. You wake up out of the shuffle and torpor only at those moments when the line moves you one step closer to the window.

After a day and a half or so the traveler will realize that crossing the continent by Interstate he gets to know the country about as well as a cable messenger knows the sea bottom.

What the disorderly crave above everything is order, what the dislocated aspire to is location.

It is not an unusual life curve for Westerners - to live i n and be shaped by the bigness, sparseness, space clarity & hopefulness of the West, to go away for study and enlargement and the perspective that distance and dissatisfaction can give, and then to return to what pleases the sight and enlists the loyalty and demands the commitment.

Wisdom is knowing what you can accept.

What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward, the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That's where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any.

As moonlight unto sunlight is that desert sage to other greens.

Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.

She was so old, she would have had to be dated by carbon 14.

Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition.

Where do I belong in this country? Where is home?

Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he's far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can't afford self-doubt and he can't let other people's opinions, even a father's, keep him from writing.

The moderns, carrying little baggage of the kind that Shelly called "merely cultural," not even living in the traditional air, but breathing into their space helmets a scientific mixture of synthetic gases (and polluted at that) are the true pioneers. Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computers hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!

There is some history that I want not to have happened. I resist the consequences of being Nemesis.

There is no way to step off the tread mill. It is all treadmill.

When you marry into a Mormon family you marry tribes and nations.

A wandering dog of a night wind came in off the sagebrush mesa carrying a bar of band music, and laid it on her doorstep like a bone.

It would be easy to call it quits. Occasionally I have these moments, not often. There is nothing to do but sit still until they pass. Tantrums and passions I don't need, endurance is what I need. I have found that it is even possible to take a certain pleasure out of submission to necessity. That have I borne, this can I bear also.

Home was a curious thing, like happiness. You never knew you had had it until it was gone.

There is one thing above all others that I despise. It is fingers, especially female fingers, messing around in my guts. My guts, like Victorian marriage, are private.

When we're young, we take so casually every sacrifice offered by the old.

A poet is somebody who has written a poem.

Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can't have a by-product unless you've got a product first .

I tell him I am proud of his genius for construction, but he says he has no genius for anything, he just never knows when he is beaten.