Top 200 Wallace Stegner Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 5

51. “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.”

— Wallace Stegner

52. “We are the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.”

— Wallace Stegner

53. “A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.”

— Wallace Stegner

54. “Largeness is a lifelong matter – sometimes a conscious goal, sometimes not. You enlarge yourself because that is the kind of individual you are. You grow because you are not content not to.”

— Wallace Stegner

55. “Human lives seldom conform to the conventions of fiction. Chekhov says that it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie. I know what he means, and I agree.”

— Wallace Stegner

56. “You achieve stature only by being good enough to deserve it, by forcing even the contemptuous and indifferent to pay attention, and to acknowledge that human relations and human emotions are of inexhaustible interest wherever they occur.”

— Wallace Stegner

57. “Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.”

— Wallace Stegner

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

— Wallace Stegner

59. “Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for.”

— Wallace Stegner

60. “He says that when asked if he feels like an old man he replies that he does not, he feels like a young man.”

— Wallace Stegner

61. “Hard writing makes easy reading.”

— Wallace Stegner

62. “No place is a place until it has found its poet.”

— Wallace Stegner

63. “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.”

— Wallace Stegner

64. “Youth hasn’t got anything to do with chronological age. It’s times of hope and happiness.”

— Wallace Stegner

65. “That have I borne, this can I bear also.”

— Wallace Stegner

66. “After a day and a half or so the traveler will realize that crossing the continent by Interstate he gets to know the country about as well as a cable messenger knows the sea bottom.”

— Wallace Stegner

67. “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, reasonable well-intentioned man can walk through the world’s great kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry.”

— Wallace Stegner

68. “Sally has a smile I would accept as my last view of earth, but it has a certain distance about it, it is under control, you can see her head going on working behind it.”

— Wallace Stegner

69. “Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn’t struck you.”

— Wallace Stegner

70. “The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends.”

— Wallace Stegner

71. “There it was, there it is, the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness its headquarters.”

— Wallace Stegner

72. “It is almost impossible to write fiction about the Mormons, for the reason that Mormon institutions and Mormon society are so peculiar that they call for constant explanation.”

— Wallace Stegner

73. “The light is nostalgic about mornings past and optimistic about mornings to come.”

— Wallace Stegner

74. “In that latitude the midsummer days were long, midsummer nights only a short darkness between the long twilight that postponed the stars and the green dawn clarity that sponged them up.”

— Wallace Stegner

75. “Where you find the greatest good, there you will also find greatest Evil, for Evil likes Paradise every bit as much as Good does. What makes the best environment for Clematis armandi makes a lovely home for leaf hoppers. A place where Joe Allston hopes to enjoy his retirement turns out to be Tom Weld’s ancestral acres and a place attractive to Caliban.”

— Wallace Stegner

76. “She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.”

— Wallace Stegner

77. “Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim’s Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else – pathway to the stars, maybe.”

— Wallace Stegner

78. “You can’t retire to weakness – you’ve got to learn to control strength.”

— Wallace Stegner

79. “I think, don’t you, that a girl with any delicacy of feeling couldn’t bring herself to marry a man indirectly responsible for her father’s death. No matter how much she was in love with him.”

— Wallace Stegner

80. “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.”

— Wallace Stegner

81. “No one who has studied Western history can cling to the belief that the Nazis invented genocide.”

— Wallace Stegner

82. “You hear what the dean said about Jesus Christ? ‘Sure He’s a good teacher, but what’s He published?”

— Wallace Stegner

83. “I’m tired of hearing that the Lord shapes the back to the burden.”

— Wallace Stegner

84. “I have heard of people’s lives being changed by a dramatic or traumatic event – a death, a divorce, a winning lottery ticket, a failed exam. I never heard of anybody’s life but ours being changed by a dinner party.”

— Wallace Stegner

85. “Young writers should be encouraged to write, and discouraged from thinking they are writers.”

— Wallace Stegner

86. “We made plenty of mistakes, but we never tripped anybody to gain an advantage, or took illegal shortcuts when no judge was around. We have all jogged and panted it out the whole way.”

— Wallace Stegner

87. “Perhaps it took several generations to make a man, perhaps it took several combinations and re-creations of his mother’s gentleness and resilience, his father’s enormous energy and appetite for the new, a subtle blending of masculine and feminine, selfish and selfless, stubborn and yielding, before a proper man could be fashioned.”

— Wallace Stegner

88. “The wicked and the unhappy always stole the show because sin and suffering were the most universal human experiences.”

— Wallace Stegner

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

— Wallace Stegner

90. “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

91. “When I was twenty I was in love with words, a wordsmith. I didn’t know enough to know when people were letting words get in their way. Now I like the words to disappear, like a transparent curtain.”

— Wallace Stegner

92. “Nothing is so safe as habit, even when habit is faked.”

— Wallace Stegner

93. “Are writers reporters, prophets, crazies, entertainers, preachers, judges, what?”

— Wallace Stegner

94. “To have so little, and it of so little value, was to be quaintly free.”

— Wallace Stegner

95. “History is not the proper midden for digging up novelties. Perhaps that is one reason why a nation bent on novelty ignores it.”

— Wallace Stegner

96. “The clear lesson of New England’s history is that when there are not enough suitable men around to run the world, women are perfectly capable of doing so.”

— Wallace Stegner

97. “In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.”

— Wallace Stegner

98. “Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?”

— Wallace Stegner

99. “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

100. “I find it hard to describe what it is like to look fully into eyes that one has known that well – known better than one knows the look of one’s own eyes, actually – and then put away, deliberately forgotten. That instantly reasserted intimacy, that resumption of what looks like friendly concern, is like nakedness, like exposure.”

— Wallace Stegner