“ That 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- Copy
- 3.3K
“ Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetimes worth of lessons. ”
- Wallace Stegner- Copy
- 2.2K
“ We simply need that wild country available to us… For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope. ”
- Wallace Stegner- Copy
- 3.5K
“ 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- Copy
- 705
“ wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good. ”
- Wallace Stegner- Copy
- 1.7K
“ The flimsy little protestations that mark the front gate of every novel, the solemn statements that any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental, are fraudulent every time. A writer has no other material to make his people from than the people of his experience ... The only thing the writer can do is to recombine parts, suppress some characterisitics and emphasize others, put two or three people into one fictional character, and pray the reallife prototypes won't sue. ”
- Wallace Stegner- Copy
- 2.6K
“ Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. ”
- Wallace Stegner- Copy
“ The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. ”
- Wallace Stegner- Copy
“ It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks. ”
- Wallace Stegner- Copy
- 2.3K
“ There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance ... some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaningtogether from the vertical which produces the false arch. 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. ”
- Wallace Stegner- Copy
- 835
“ Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality. ”
- Wallace Stegner- Copy
- 3.3K
“ 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 selfdoubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing. ”
- Wallace Stegner- Copy
- 130
“ Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations too many. Something. ”
- Wallace Stegner- Copy
- 1.9K
“ Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it. ”
- Wallace Stegner- Copy
“ 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 byproduct, 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. ”
- Wallace Stegner- Copy
“ 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 selfdoubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing. ”
- Wallace Stegner- Copy
“ Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. ”
- Wallace Stegner- Copy
- 3.3K
“ The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. ”
- Wallace Stegner- Copy
- 1.8K
“ 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 wellintentioned man can walk through the world's great kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry. ”
- Wallace Stegner- Copy
- 3.5K
“ No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike. ”
- Wallace Stegner- Copy
- 3.8K
“ We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [...] My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings. ”
- Wallace Stegner- Copy
- 1.5K
“ Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. ”
- Wallace Stegner- Copy
- 1.9K
- 1