Top 200 Wallace Stegner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Talent can’t be taught, but it can be awakened.”

— Wallace Stegner

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

— Wallace Stegner

3. “There is a sense in which we are all each other’s consequences.”

— Wallace Stegner

4. “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.”

— Wallace Stegner

5. “National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.”

— Wallace Stegner

6. “We write to make sense of it all.”

— Wallace Stegner

7. “You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.”

— Wallace Stegner

8. “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

9. “The brook would lose its song if we removed the rocks.”

— Wallace Stegner

10. “Water is the true wealth in a dry land.”

— Wallace Stegner

11. “Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.”

— Wallace Stegner

12. “American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging.”

— Wallace Stegner

13. “Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”

— Wallace Stegner

14. “We are fossils in the making.”

— Wallace Stegner

15. “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

16. “No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.”

— Wallace Stegner

17. “The perfect weather of Indian Summer lengthened and lingered, warm sunny days were followed by brisk nights with Halloween a presentiment in the air.”

— Wallace Stegner

18. “That is all the National Parks are about. Use, but do no harm.”

— Wallace Stegner

19. “If you’re going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.”

— Wallace Stegner

20. “Fossil energy is the worst discovery man ever made, and his disruption of the carbon-oxygen cycle is the greatest of his triumphs over nature. Through thinner and thinner air we labor toward our last end, conquerors finally of even the earth chemistry that created us.”

— Wallace Stegner

21. “I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow.”

— Wallace Stegner

22. “The irony is that the novel with its Pulitzer and its controversy has brought more attention to Mary Hallock Foote than she would ever have received otherwise.”

— Wallace Stegner

23. “The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.”

— Wallace Stegner

24. “Chaos is the law of nature; order is the dream of man.”

— Wallace Stegner

25. “This early piece of the morning is mine.”

— Wallace Stegner

26. “I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. I was fascinated by how it sped by and yet was always there; its roar shook both the earth and me.”

— Wallace Stegner

27. “If we don’t know where we are, we don’t know who we are.”

— Wallace Stegner

28. “Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.”

— Wallace Stegner

29. “Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake.”

— Wallace Stegner

30. “It is somethingit can be everything-to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below.”

— Wallace Stegner

31. “We were going to leave a mark on the world but instead the world left marks on us.”

— Wallace Stegner

32. “Every action is an idea before it is an action, and perhaps a feeling before it is an idea, and every idea rests upon other ideas that have preceded it in time.”

— Wallace Stegner

33. “Every green natural place we save saves a fragment of our sanity and gives us a little more hope that we have a future.”

— Wallace Stegner

34. “Drama demands the reversal of expectation, but in such a way that the first surprise is followed by an immediate recognition of inevitability. And inevitability takes careful pin-setting.”

— Wallace Stegner

35. “When you’re nailing a custard pie to the wall, and it starts to wilt, it doesn’t do any good to hammer in more nails.”

— Wallace Stegner

36. “Have a chance to create a society to match its scenery.”

— Wallace Stegner

37. “I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.”

— Wallace Stegner

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

— Wallace Stegner

39. “Expose a child to a particular environment at this susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.”

— Wallace Stegner

40. “Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.”

— Wallace Stegner

41. “I was shaped by the west and have lived most of my life in it, and nothing would gratify me more than to see it in all its subregions and subcultures both prosperous and environmentally healthy, with a civilization to match its scenery.”

— Wallace Stegner

42. “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

43. “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

44. “As moonlight unto sunlight is that desert sage to other greens.”

— Wallace Stegner

45. “Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.”

— Wallace Stegner

46. “It would be easy to call it quits. Occasionally I have these moments, not often. There is nothing to do but sit still until they pass. Tantrums and passions I don’t need, endurance is what I need. I have found that it is even possible to take a certain pleasure out of submission to necessity. That have I borne, this can I bear also.”

— Wallace Stegner

47. “The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.”

— Wallace Stegner

48. “A muddy little stream, a village grown unfamiliar with time and trees. I turn around and retrace my way up Main Street and park and have a Coke in the confectionery store. It is run by a Greek, as it used to be, but whether the same Greek or another I would not know. He does not recognize me, nor I him. Only the smell of his place is familiar, syrupy with old delights, as if the ghost of my first banana split had come close to breathe on me.”

— Wallace Stegner

49. “After all, what are any of us after but the conviction of belonging?”

— Wallace Stegner

50. “There is nothing like a doorbell to precipitate the potential into the kinetic.”

— Wallace Stegner