Top 200 Wallace Stegner Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “She studied it soberly, with something like recognition or acknowledgment in her eyes, as if those who have been dead understand things that will never be understood by those who have only lived.”

— Wallace Stegner

102. “When we’re young, we take so casually every sacrifice offered by the old.”

— Wallace Stegner

103. “How to write a story, though ignorant or baffled. You take something that is important to you, something you have brooded about. You try to see it as clearly as you can, and to fix it in a transferable equivalent. All you want in the finished print is the clean statement of the lens, which is yourself, on the subject that has been absorbing your attention. Sure, it’s autobiography. Sure, it’s fiction. Either way, if you have done it right, it’s true.”

— Wallace Stegner

104. “If you wanted something, you planned for it, worked for it, and made it happen.”

— Wallace Stegner

105. “A wandering dog of a night wind came in off the sagebrush mesa carrying a bar of band music, and laid it on her doorstep like a bone.”

— Wallace Stegner

106. “I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun.”

— Wallace Stegner

107. “This place is like the back entrance to a black cow.”

— Wallace Stegner

108. “Values, both those that we approve and those that we don’t, have roots as deep as creosote rings, and live as long and grow as slowly.”

— Wallace Stegner

109. “I am impressed by how much of my grandparent’s life depended on continuities, contacts, connections, friendships, and blood relationships.”

— Wallace Stegner

110. “Be bold, he says. Be brave. Be true to your birthright, what you recognize in your heart.”

— Wallace Stegner

111. “He cited me her own remark that she wrote from the protected point of view, the woman’s point of view, as evidence that she went through her life from inexperience to inexperience.”

— Wallace Stegner

112. “The only life we know well, the one on which we are the ultimate authority, is our own. The only experience to which we can bear witness is that which we have personally endured and observed.”

— Wallace Stegner

113. “She was still developing her sundial theory of art, which would count no hours but the sunny ones.”

— Wallace Stegner

114. “There is one thing above all others that I despise. It is fingers, especially female fingers, messing around in my guts. My guts, like Victorian marriage, are private.”

— Wallace Stegner

115. “I didn’t know myself well, and still don’t. But I did know, and know now, the few people I loved and trusted. My feeling for them is one part of me I have never quarreled with, even though my relations with them have more than once been abrasive.”

— Wallace Stegner

116. “We’re all tougher than we think we are. We’re fixed so that almost anything heals.”

— Wallace Stegner

117. “Actually he never expected much of people, and so he wasn’t upset if they turned out to be shysters or chiselers or crooks. But a few people he trusted absolutely. It was when they betrayed him that he turned to rock.”

— Wallace Stegner

118. “Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.”

— Wallace Stegner

119. “The air is so crisp it gives me a brief, delusive sense of health and youth. those I don’t have but I have learned not to scorn the substitutes: quiet, plenty of time, and a job to spend it on.”

— Wallace Stegner

120. “He still wore, in the warming barracks, a muskrat cap with earlaps. Under it his eyes were gray as agates, as sudden as an elbow in the solar plexus.”

— Wallace Stegner

121. “There is something about all beards that is like the gesture of thumbing the nose. Thank you very much. Up yours.”

— Wallace Stegner

122. “Westerners live outdoors more than people elsewhere because outdoors is mainly what they’ve got.”

— Wallace Stegner

123. “A political animal can be defined as a body that will go on circulating a petition even with its heart cut out.”

— Wallace Stegner

124. “I balked at nothing, I was above nothing. Everything had something to teach me.”

— Wallace Stegner

125. “Then I come out on the shoulder of the hill, and there is the whole sky, immense and full of light that has drowned the stars. Its edges are piled with hills. Over Stannard Mountain the air is hot gold, and as I watch, the sun surges up over the crest and stares me down.”

— Wallace Stegner

126. “But we all hoped, in whatever way our capacities permitted, to define and illustrate the worthy life. With me it was always to be done in words; Sid too, though with less confidence. With Sally it was sympathy, human understanding, a tenderness toward human cussedness or frailty. And with Charity it was organization, order, action, assistance to the uncertain, and direction to the wavering.”

— Wallace Stegner

127. “He used to tell me, ‘Do what you like to do. It’ll probably turn out to be what you do best.”

— Wallace Stegner

128. “Are you a reader? If you aren’t a reader, you might as well forget trying to be a writer.”

— Wallace Stegner

129. “Leave a mark on the world. Instead, the world has left marks on us. We got older. Life chastened us so that now we lie waiting to die, or walk on canes, or sit on porches where once the young juices flowed strongly, and feel old and inept and confused.”

— Wallace Stegner

130. “The ferocious virtues that had been necessary for survival on the American frontier were theirs: they were men who lived freely, wastefully, independently, and they lived by killing – animals as a rule, men if necessary.”

— Wallace Stegner

131. “It is the abiding concern of thinking people to preserve what keeps men human-to save our contact with nature of which we are a part.”

— Wallace Stegner

132. “I can stand anything I have to stand!”

— Wallace Stegner

133. “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

134. “It is hard doctrine, but I was beginning to understand it then, and I have not repudiated it till now: that love, not sin, costs us Eden. Love is a carrier of death – the only thing, in fact, that makes death significant.”

— Wallace Stegner

135. “She will burn bright until she goes out; she will go on standing on tiptoe till she falls.”

— Wallace Stegner

136. “As the country at large grows more stressful as a dwelling place, the quiet, remoteness, and solitude of a week on a wild river become more and more precious to more and more people.”

— Wallace Stegner

137. “I consider the integrity of the material to be of greater value than any message I might want to get across.”

— Wallace Stegner

138. “If you avoid the killer diseases and keep the degenerative ones under control with sensible diet and exercise and whatever chemotherapy you need to stay in balance, you can live nearly forever.”

— Wallace Stegner

139. “You can’t be close to the mortality of friends without being brought to think of your own.”

— Wallace Stegner

140. “What the disorderly crave above everything is order, what the dislocated aspire to is location.”

— Wallace Stegner

141. “I tell him I am proud of his genius for construction, but he says he has no genius for anything, he just never knows when he is beaten.”

— Wallace Stegner

142. “Knowledge extends in promontories and bays; or to put it vertically rather than horizontally, the strata from remote to recent never lie so unbroken that we cannot find some line of unconformity where the imagination must make a leap. There are so many horizons, geological and human, where the evidence is missing or incomplete.”

— Wallace Stegner

143. “We do not write what we know; we write what we want to find out.”

— Wallace Stegner

144. “Home was a curious thing, like happiness. You never knew you had had it until it was gone.”

— Wallace Stegner

145. “Well, there’s so much to read, and I’m so far behind.”

— Wallace Stegner

146. “Maybe we were the Diggers of literature.”

— Wallace Stegner

147. “It was as if she had thought him into existence again, as if her mind were a flask into which had been poured a measure of longing, a measure of discontent, a measure of fatigue, a dash of bitterness, and pouf, there he stood.”

— Wallace Stegner

148. “In general the assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a new country had no history. History was something that applied to other places.”

— Wallace Stegner

149. “We are strange creatures, and writers are stranger creatures than most.”

— Wallace Stegner

150. “Imprisoned in reiterative seasons, vacillating between hope and disappointment, they were kept from being the vigorous doers that their nature and their culture instructed them to be.”

— Wallace Stegner