Quotes from Wallace Stegner

What little strength he had left flowed out of him and was soaked up; his bones and veins and skin held nothing but tiredness and pain.

Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim's Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else - pathway to the stars, maybe.

intellectual hare

I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun.

But this general business of trusting people, I don't know. I doubt if I can change. I believe in trusting people, do you see? At least till they prove they can't be trusted. What kind of life is it when you can't?

There is something about all beards that is like the gesture of thumbing the nose. Thank you very much. Up yours.

No Eden valid without serpent.

Which demonstrates our need of a sense of history : we need it to know what real injustice looked like.

So what happened when base desires and unworthy passions troubled the flesh of men and women inhibited from casual promiscuity, adultery, and divorce that keep us so healthy?

He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man

Their humor is underdog humor, a put-down of what is more powerful than they.

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

There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood, Touch of manner, hint of mood . . ." How does it go?

Going up the path she felt that she was crying silently inside, drowning in desolate unshed tears.

Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match,

Then I come out on the shoulder of the hill, and there is the whole sky, immense and full of light that has drowned the stars. Its edges are piled with hills. Over Stannard Mountain the air is hot gold, and as I watch, the sun surges up over the crest and stares me down.

I can stand anything I have to stand!

Each child marked a decline in the security of their life.

The ferocious virtues that had been necessary for survival on the American frontier were theirs: they were men who lived freely, wastefully, independently, and they lived by killing--animals as a rule, men if necessary.

In my experience, the world's happiest man is a young professor building bookcases.

You are at once a lasting presence and an unhealed wound.

Stegner shows us, again and again, that it is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one.

There is a revisionist theory, one of those depth-psychology distortions or half-truths that crop up like toadstools whenever the emotions get infected by the mind, that says we hate worst those who have done the most for us. According

I'm tired of hearing that the Lord shapes the back to the burden.