278 Quotes by Wallace Stegner

She will burn bright until she goes out; she will go on standing on tiptoe till she falls.

The clear lesson of New England’s history is that when there are not enough suitable men around to run the world, women are perfectly capable of doing so.

Mexico was an interlude of magic between a chapter of defeats and an unturned page.

It would be easy to call it quits. Occasionally I have these moments, not often. There is nothing to do but sit still until they pass. Tantrums and passions I don’t need, endurance is what I need. I have found that it is even possible to take a certain pleasure out of submission to necessity. That have I borne, this can I bear also.

How to write a story, though ignorant or baffled. You take something that is important to you, something you have brooded about. You try to see it as clearly as you can, and to fix it in a transferable equivalent. All you want in the finished print is the clean statement of the lens, which is yourself, on the subject that has been absorbing your attention. Sure, it’s autobiography. Sure, it’s fiction. Either way, if you have done it right, it’s true.

I shall be richer all my life for this sorrow.

I must accept the justice of death and the injustice of more “life”; I had no right to remain a single hour.

You can’t retire to weakness – you’ve got to learn to control strength.

Well, there’s so much to read, and I’m so far behind.