Top 200 Wallace Stegner Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Good fortune, contentment, peace, happiness have never been able to deceive me for long. I expected the worst, and I was right. So much for the dream of man.”

— Wallace Stegner

152. “Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition.”

— Wallace Stegner

153. “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

154. “Going up the path she felt that she was crying silently inside, drowning in desolate unshed tears.”

— Wallace Stegner

155. “You are at once a lasting presence and an unhealed wound.”

— Wallace Stegner

156. “Like many another Western pioneer, he had heard the clock of history strike, and counted the strokes wrong.”

— Wallace Stegner

157. “But this general business of trusting people, I don’t know. I doubt if I can change. I believe in trusting people, do you see? At least till they prove they can’t be trusted. What kind of life is it when you can’t?”

— Wallace Stegner

158. “I must accept the justice of death and the injustice of more “life”; I had no right to remain a single hour.”

— Wallace Stegner

159. “Marian’s eyes absolutely blaze. To meet them is to have a shock of contact as if they were electrically charged. “Now you see? You wondered what was in whale’s milk. Don’t you know now? The same thing that’s in a mushroom spore so small you need a microscope to see it, or in gophers, or poison oak, or anything else we try to pave under or grub out, or poison. There isn’t good life and bad life, there’s only life. Think of the force down there, just telling things to get born!”

— Wallace Stegner

160. “The writers I admired and still admire were not carpenters, but more like sculptors. Their art was and is a real probing of real and troubling human confusions.”

— Wallace Stegner

161. “Stegner shows us, again and again, that it is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one.”

— Wallace Stegner

162. “Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything – though it might have been a good thing if he’d also taught her to question the act of questioning.”

— Wallace Stegner

163. “Each child marked a decline in the security of their life.”

— Wallace Stegner

164. “In my experience, the world’s happiest man is a young professor building bookcases.”

— Wallace Stegner

165. “Mexico was an interlude of magic between a chapter of defeats and an unturned page.”

— Wallace Stegner

166. “As a practitioner of hindsight I know that Grandfather was trying to do, by personal initiative and with the financial resources of a small and struggling corporation, what only the immense power of the federal government ultimately proved able to do. That does not mean he was foolish or mistaken. He was premature. His clock was set on pioneer time. He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn’t yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid.”

— Wallace Stegner

167. “Children from a big family have the benefit of a certain amount of neglect.”

— Wallace Stegner

168. “A poem isn’t selfish. It speaks to people.”

— Wallace Stegner

169. “Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras. Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don’t warrant attention as individuals. One.”

— Wallace Stegner

170. “What I am sure of is that friendship – not love, friendship – is as possible between women as between men, and that in either case it is often stronger for not having to cross sexual picket lines. Sexuality and mistrust often go together, and both are incompatible with amicitia.”

— Wallace Stegner

171. “Nevertheless, no fictions.”

— Wallace Stegner

172. “Mailbox scenes are the dramatic moments of our undramatic life.”

— Wallace Stegner

173. “Seen in either geological or biological terms, we don’t warrant attention as individuals. One of us doesn’t differ that much from another, each generation repeats its parents, the works we build to outlast us are not much more enduring than anthills, and much less so than coral reefs.”

— Wallace Stegner

174. “It is something – it 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; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidentally fly into something you can’t handle.”

— Wallace Stegner

175. “Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health is poor, or their energy low, or their obligations too many. Something.”

— Wallace Stegner

176. “The best thing we have learned from nearly five hundred years of contact with the American wilderness is restraint, the willingness to hold our hand: to visit such places for our souls’ good, but leave no tracks.”

— Wallace Stegner

177. “Home is a notion that only the nations the of homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend. What else would one plant in a wilderness or on a frontier? What loss would hurt more?”

— Wallace Stegner

178. “When she tipped her head and looked upward at the glowing dark blue dome pricked with its millions of lights, bigger and brighter than stars had ever been, she felt the mountains breathe in her face their ancient, frightening cold.”

— Wallace Stegner

179. “Anyone who reads, even one from the remote Southwest at the far end of an attenuated tradition, is to some extent a citizen of the world, and I had been a hungry reader all my life.”

— Wallace Stegner

180. “As the saying goes, I don’t want his blood on the rug.”

— Wallace Stegner

181. “Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn’t struck you. 8 Here is one thing that eventually struck me: March 19, 1938, a Saturday.”

— Wallace Stegner

182. “We all hitched our wagons to the highest stars we could find.”

— Wallace Stegner

183. “Which demonstrates our need of a sense of history : we need it to know what real injustice looked like.”

— Wallace Stegner

184. “But Judas, now, sitting at the Last Supper trying to disguise his treachery, with that symbolic cat behind him, he was something else because of his human complexity.”

— Wallace Stegner

185. “Is that the basis of friendship? Is it as reactive as that? Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting?”

— Wallace Stegner

186. “In high school, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a bunch of us spent a whole year reading Cicero – De Senectute, on old age; De Amicitia, on friendship. De Senectute, with all its resigned wisdom, I will probably never be capable of living up to or imitating. But De Amicitia I could make a stab at, and could have any time in the last thirty-four years.”

— Wallace Stegner

187. “All the little Indians in a half circle around Aunt Emily are getting an imprinting that will last for life. The sound of her voice reading will condition how they look upon themselves and the world. It will become part of the loved ambience of Battell Pond, a glint in the chromatic wonder of childhood. These small sensibilities will never lose the images of dark woods and bright lake. Nature to them will always be beneficent and female.”

— Wallace Stegner

188. “Long-continued disability makes some people saintly, some self-pitying, some bitter.”

— Wallace Stegner

189. “She is also capable of a noble generosity, and of cramming it down on the head of the recipient like a crown of thorns.”

— Wallace Stegner

190. “I was pondering the vanity of human wishes and the desperation of human hope, the tooth of time, the vulnerability of good and the unseen omnipresence of evil, and the frailty and passion of life.”

— Wallace Stegner

191. “It is strange to find ourselves people of consequence.”

— Wallace Stegner

192. “I don’t care how they speculate, or what their answers are. We live as we can, we do what we must, and not everything goes by either Freudian or Victorian patterns. What I am sure of is that friendship – not love, friendship – is as possible between women as between men, and that in either case it is often stronger for not having to cross sexual picket lines. Sexuality and mistrust often go together, and both are incompatible with amicitia.”

— Wallace Stegner

193. “Even while you paid attention to what you must do today and tomorrow, you heard the receding sound of what you had relinquished.”

— Wallace Stegner

194. “Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can’t have a by-product unless you’ve had a product first. It’s immoral not to get in and work and get your hands dirty.”

— Wallace Stegner

195. “In a way, it is beautiful to be young and hard up. With the right wife, and I had her, deprivation becomes a game. In the next two weeks we spent a few dollars on white paint and dotted swiss, and were settled. The.”

— Wallace Stegner

196. “Is it compulsory to be one of the immortals? We’re all decent godless people, Hallie. Let’s not be too hard on each other if we don’t set the world afire. There’s already been enough of that.”

— Wallace Stegner

197. “You’ve got a resilient temperament, Mister Morgan,” Sally said. “I have to compensate for a woman who lives in constant anxiety, depression, and alarm.”

— Wallace Stegner

198. “But the day that had started crooked insisted on going crooked, like a cross-threaded screw.”

— Wallace Stegner

199. “She sounded tinny and false. Poor lady, she found it as difficult as I did to know how to act or what to say. Later, with practice, we might do better. The star had her part down cold, but the male lead didn’t like his lines, and the walk-ons had never seen the script until forty minutes ago.”

— Wallace Stegner

200. “There is a revisionist theory, one of those depth-psychology distortions or half-truths that crop up like toadstools whenever the emotions get infected by the mind, that says we hate worst those who have done the most for us. According.”

— Wallace Stegner