278 Quotes by Wallace Stegner

When you’re nailing a custard pie to the wall, and it starts to wilt, it doesn’t do any good to hammer in more nails.

I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without drugs or orgies, have more fun.

If you’re going to get old, you might as well get as old as you can get.

But this general business of trusting people, I don’t know. I doubt if I can change. I believe in trusting people, do you see? At least till they prove they can’t be trusted. What kind of life is it when you can’t?

The light is nostalgic about mornings past and optimistic about mornings to come.

It is hard doctrine, but I was beginning to understand it then, and I have not repudiated it till now: that love, not sin, costs us Eden. Love is a carrier of death – the only thing, in fact, that makes death significant.

She was still developing her sundial theory of art, which would count no hours but the sunny ones.

The wicked and the unhappy always stole the show because sin and suffering were the most universal human experiences.

In my experience, the world’s happiest man is a young professor building bookcases.