Site uses cookies to provide basic functionality.

OK
Search Quotes tags
Query
Tags
Author
1 2 3 4 5 6 ▲ ▼
Link Quote Stars Tags Author
99acba9 Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. life-lessons wisdom wounds hurt scars Wallace Stegner
546b6ff Touch. It is touch that is the deadliest enemy of chastity, loyalty, monogamy, gentility with its codes and conventions and restraints. By touch we are betrayed and betray others ... an accidental brushing of shoulders or touching of hands ... hands laid on shoulders in a gesture of comfort that lies like a thief, that takes, not gives, that wants, not offers, that awakes, not pacifies. When one flesh is waiting, there is electricity in the.. infidelity longing touch Wallace Stegner
aefadd0 Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. nature wilderness Wallace Stegner
5e2eefa T]hat old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes had been wiped clean by summer. back-to-school new-beginnings september fall summer Wallace Stegner
20a52c7 Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend. homelessness belonging attachment roots home Wallace Stegner
00bf748 You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine. Wallace Stegner
4b59d53 Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept. wisdom Wallace Stegner
8ed60eb It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any. life conduct-of-life society rules Wallace Stegner
1c776b7 The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. life-lessons wisdom wounds scars Wallace Stegner
0786932 There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences. each-other we sense consequences Wallace Stegner
fc94738 He used to tell me, 'Do what you like to do. It'll probably turn out to be what you do best. Wallace Stegner
4fa869c She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into. Wallace Stegner
ccb42e4 Friendship] is a relationship that has no formal shape, there are no rules or obligations or bonds as in marriage or the family, it is held together by neither law nor property nor blood, there is no glue in it but mutual liking. It is therefore rare. Wallace Stegner
d8aa19b 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
19734a1 I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places. shallowness familiarity depth home intimacy Wallace Stegner
fd5e0e8 The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be .. loneliness silence shallowness modern-society stillness isolation peace noise technology Wallace Stegner
26854fc Youth hasn't got anything to do with chronological age. It's times of hope and happiness. Wallace Stegner
a25da2b Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable. town Wallace Stegner
1f4a54a 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
ab35944 One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery. optimism conservation cooperation environment individualism Wallace Stegner
e0a8848 I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow Wallace Stegner
7cf081a Do we respond only to people who seem to find us interesting? Wallace Stegner
48976af Our last impression of her as she turned the corner was that smile, flung backward like a handful of flowers. Wallace Stegner
53be3ef 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
bc9a6bd Some people, I am told, have memories like computers, nothing to do but punch the button and wait for the print-out. Mine is more like a Japanese library of the old style, without a card file or an indexing system or any systematic shelf plan. Nobody knows where anything is except the old geezer in felt slippers who has been shuffling up and down those stacks for sixty-nine years. When you hand him a problem he doesn't come back with a cart.. Wallace Stegner
34b6b94 wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good. good philosophy paradise Wallace Stegner
6dff13e 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
095ebe1 How do you make a book that anyone will read out of lives as quiet as these? Where are the things that novelists seize upon and readers expect? Where is the high life, the conspicuous waste, the violence, the kinky sex, the death wish? Where are the suburban infidelities, the promiscuities, the convulsive divorces, the alcohol, the drugs, the lost weekends? Where are the hatreds, the political ambitions, the lust for power? Where are speed,.. Wallace Stegner
771e646 You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength. strength weakness power Wallace Stegner
faebe56 Civilizations grow by agreements and accomodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow -- haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to --.. rebellion humanity human-condition civilization growth society revolution Wallace Stegner
e17a18c Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . . inspirational wilderness Wallace Stegner
3f9cee8 If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c , anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped m.. Wallace Stegner
917f3d1 No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike. time Wallace Stegner
577d25b 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 an man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else -- pathway to the stars,.. Wallace Stegner
a7d7518 Hard writing makes easy reading. writing Wallace Stegner
251f1ca There is another physical law that teases me, too: the Doppler Effect. The sound of anything coming at you- a train, say, or the future- has a higher pitch than the sound of the same thing going away. If you have perfect pitch and a head for mathematics you can compute the speed of the object by the interval between its arriving and departing sounds. I have neither perfect pitch nor a head for mathematics, and anyway who wants to compute th.. Wallace Stegner
39bde67 What ever happened to the passion we all had to improve ourselves, live up to our potential, leave a mark on the world? Our hottest arguments were always about how we could contribute. We did not care about the rewards. We were young and earnest. passion youth contributions Wallace Stegner
c3c4b3c You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me. Wallace Stegner
ea340b9 It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks. death moving Wallace Stegner
ea8b2bf Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains. Wallace Stegner
9744f1c A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out. Wallace Stegner
8c35e9f 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. writing imagination senses images Wallace Stegner
0a89445 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
02e3de5 Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality. Wallace Stegner
1 2 3 4 5 6 ▲ ▼