Quotes from Wallace Stegner

It's idealistic, it's for love and gentleness, it's close to nature, it hurts nobody, it's voluntary. I can't see anything wrong with any of that.' 'Neither can I. The only trouble is, this commune will be inhabited by and surrounded by members of the human race.

I honestly believe that the counsel I gave Curt was mainly sound, and I don't think too much of it was holier-than-thou. I tried to give him a code to live by. He wanted not one scrap of it, he didn't agree with a single value that I held.

It is something—it can be everything-to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can't handle.

Y]ou were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase [angle of repose] as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; you tried to apply it to your own wandering and uneasy life ... I wonder if you ever reached it.

He looks into his Dixie cup and looks back up as if surprised at what he found there. The future, maybe.

Yet now, having held in grief and resentment, and evaded thinking too much about the episode that changed my life with the finality of an axe, here I am exalted by having made use of it, by having spilled my guts in public. We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.

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

The only life we know well, the one on which we are the ultimate authority, is our own. The only experience to which we can bear witness is that which we have personally endured and observed.

He still wore, in the warming barracks, a muskrat cap with earlaps. Under it his eyes were gray as agates, as sudden as an elbow in the solar plexus.

She will burn bright until she goes out; she will go on standing on tiptoe until she falls.

Perhaps it took several generations to make a man, perhaps it took several combinations and re-creations of his mother's gentleness and resilience, his father's enormous energy and appetite for the new, a subtle blending of masculine and feminine, selfish and selfless, stubborn and yielding, before a proper man could be fashioned.

You hear what the dean said about Jesus Christ? 'Sure He's a good teacher, but what's He published?

If I spoke to Rodman in those terms, saying that my grandparents' lives seem to me organic and ours what? hydroponic? he would ask in derision what I meant. Define my terms. How do you measure the organic residue of a man or a generation? This is all metaphor. If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist.

That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. "It's all right," he said. "But I'd take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That's about used up, I should think.

When you're nailing a custard pie to the wall, and it starts to wilt, it doesn't do any good to hammer in more nails.

For history is a pontoon bridge. Every man walks and works at its building end, and has come as far as he has over the pontoons laid by others he may never have heard of.

She studied it soberly, with something like recognition or acknowledgment in her eyes, as if those who have been dead understand things that will never be understood by those who have only lived.

A poem isn't selfish. It speaks to people.

Poems ought to reflect the work the poet does, and his relationships with other people, and family, and institutions, and organization.

For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed.

Like many another Western pioneer, he had heard the clock of history strike, and counted the strokes wrong.

The Cypress Hills massacre,...one of the final outrages of the literally lawless West...came...along that practical and symbolic divide, between the Canadian system of monopoly trading and the American system of competition, whiskey, bullets, exploitation, and extermination.

Habit is my true, my wedded wife.