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Wallace Stegner Quotes

Wallace Stegner quotes about life

American Novelist February 18, 1909 – April 13, 1993

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Quotes

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
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... Wallace Stegner
How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed, noise, ugliness, everything that makes us who we are... Wallace Stegner
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 well-intentioned man can walk through the world's great kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry. Wallace Stegner
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 leaning-together 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
[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. Wallace Stegner
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. Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner quote: "The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue..."
The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner quote: "Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life..."
Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not towisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner quote: "No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock..."
No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike. Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner quote: "I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow"
I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow Wallace Stegner

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