Wallace Stegner

“One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope.”

“It is the unprotected side of the planet, a realm of constant beginnings, a testing ground for innovations and ideas.”

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed...”

“You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale.”

“Wisdom. It's a funny word. I don't think it's a thing you get. I think it's a thing you do.”

“National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.”

“The wilderness idea is a resource in itself. A resource of hope.”

“Writers, like whiskey, need time to mature.”

“No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments.”

“The West, in other words, is a country in the mind, and so, in a sense, is every place.”

“We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate.”

“Expose a child to a particular environment at his susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.”

“Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world.”

“There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences.”

“The sense of place is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial perception together.”

“It should not be denied... that being footloose has always exhilarated us.”

“It is not an unusual evening. It is just more so.”