278 Quotes by Wallace Stegner

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.

Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition.

I can stand anything I have to stand!

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.

Nothing is so safe as habit, even when habit is faked.

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

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.

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.

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.