Wallace Stegner > Quotes

“Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to
wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird

“Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others ... an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands ... hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the merest contact.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“[T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water

“Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“It should not be denied... that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led West.”
― Wallace Stegner

“it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.”
― Wallace Stegner

“It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.”
― Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things

“The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird

“[Friendship] is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences.”
― Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things

“He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.”
― Wallace Stegner

“[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“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?”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“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.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

“We write to make sense of it all.”
― Wallace Stegner

“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.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water

“I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow”
― Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things

“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.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“Our last impression of her as she turned the corner was that smile, flung backward like a handful of flowers.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

“Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch the button and wait for the print-out. Mine is more like a Japanese library of the old style, without a card file or an indexing system or any systematic shelf plan. Nobody knows where anything is except the old geezer in felt slippers who has been shuffling up and down those stacks for sixty-nine years. When you hand him a problem he doesn't come back with a cartful and dump it before you, a jackpot of instant retrieval. He finds one thing, which reminds him of another, which leads him off to the annex, which directs him to the east wing, which sends him back two tiers from where he started. Bit by bit he finds you what you want, but like his boss who seems to be under pressure to examine his life, he takes his time.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird

“Wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.”
― Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things