278 Quotes by Wallace Stegner

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.

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

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.

If we don’t know where we are, we don’t know who we are.

Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don’t practice it.

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.

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

Largeness is a lifelong matter – sometimes a conscious goal, sometimes not. You enlarge yourself because that is the kind of individual you are. You grow because you are not content not to.

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