Wallace Stegner

Thanks to the growing strength of environmental organizations, there will always be some back country to provide us with a touch of wonder and a breath of fresh air.

We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?

No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.

Hard writing makes easy reading.

By his very profession, a serious fiction writer is a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life, a perceiver and handler of things. His most valuable tools are his sense and his memory; what happens in his mind is primarily pictures.

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.

wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.

Be proud of every scar on your heart, each one holds a lifetime’s worth of lessons.

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

You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.

Salt is added to dried rose petals with the perfume and spices, when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

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.

He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best.

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

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?

Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.