278 Quotes by Wallace Stegner

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

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

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.

We simply need that wild country available to us... For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.

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

You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.

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.

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.

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