278 Quotes by Wallace Stegner

The air is so crisp it gives me a brief, delusive sense of health and youth. those I don’t have but I have learned not to scorn the substitutes: quiet, plenty of time, and a job to spend it on.

There is one thing above all others that I despise. It is fingers, especially female fingers, messing around in my guts. My guts, like Victorian marriage, are private.

I can’t see that Danish episode as an adventure, or a crisis survived, or a serious quest for anything definable. It was just another happening like today’s luncheon, something I got into and got out of. And it reminds me too much of how little life changes: how, without dramatic events or high resolves, without tragedy, without even pathos, a reasonably endowed, reasonably well-intentioned man can walk through the world’s great kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry.

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.

When we’re young, we take so casually every sacrifice offered by the old.

Youth hasn’t got anything to do with chronological age. It’s times of hope and happiness.

Mailbox scenes are the dramatic moments of our undramatic life.

Drama demands the reversal of expectation, but in such a way that the first surprise is followed by an immediate recognition of inevitability. And inevitability takes careful pin-setting.

In that latitude the midsummer days were long, midsummer nights only a short darkness between the long twilight that postponed the stars and the green dawn clarity that sponged them up.