Wallace Stegner Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. 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. The Spectator Bird

2. Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not towisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. The Spectator Bird

3. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus. The Spectator Bird

4. There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance ... some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone. Angle of Repose

5. Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept. Angle of Repose

6. Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he’s far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can’t afford self-doubt and he can’t let other people’s opinions, even a father’s, keep him from writing. Crossing to Safety

7. Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality. Angle of Repose

8. No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike. Angle of Repose

9. Poetry ought to be a by-product of living, and you can't have a by-product unless you've got a product first. Crossing to Safety

10. We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. ... That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. [...]My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings. Angle of Repose

11. Wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good. All the Little Live Things