Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner
Wallace Earle Stegnerwas an American novelist, short story writer, environmentalist, and historian, often called "The Dean of Western Writers". He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth18 February 1909
CountryUnited States of America
essentials individualism belonging
American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.
teacher teaching people
A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.
trying might forget
Are you a reader? If you aren't a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.
west adaptation process
The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.
independent eye trying
To try to save for everyone, for the hostile and independent as well as the committed, some of the health that flows down across the green ridges from the skyline, and some of the beauty and spirit that are still available to any resident of the valley who has a moment and the wit to lift up his eyes unto the hills.
two hopeful brain
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.
long locks matter
Largeness is a lifelong matter. You grow because you are not content not to. You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn't, it's teeth grow long and lock. You grow because you are a grower; you're large because you can't stand to be small.
nature effort might
We are the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.
broken-heart encouragement inspirational-life
Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
taught crafts talent
Talent can't be taught, but it can be awakened.
who-i-am may knows
I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.
life wall exercise
... I was reminded of a remark of Willa Cather's, that you can't paint sunlight, you can only paint what it does with shadows on a wall. If you examine a life, as Socrates has been so tediously advising us to do for so many centuries, do you really examine a life, or do you examine the shadows it casts on other lives? Entity or relationships? Objective reality or the vanishing point of a multiple perspective exercise? Prism or the rainbows it refracts? And what if you're the wall? What if you never cast a shadow or rainbow of your own, but have only caught those cast by others?
land water dry
Water is the true wealth in a dry land.
humble responsibility men
I am terribly glad to be alive; and when I have wit enough to think about it, terribly proud to be a man and an American, with all the rights and privileges that those words connote; and most of all I am humble before the responsibilities that are also mine. For no right comes without a responsibility, and being born luckier than most of the world's millions, I am also born more obligated.