“It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live wit...”
Author detail
Wallace Earle Stegner was an American novelist, short story writer, environmentalist, and historian, often called "The Dean of Western Writers". He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977. - wikipedia
Quotes
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“It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live wit...”
“wherever you find the greatest good, you will find the greatest evil, because evil loves paradise as much as good.”
“Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”
“The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”
“Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.”
“It's easier to die than to move ... at least for the Other Side you don't need trunks.”
“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...”
“Hope was always out ahead of fact, possibility obscured the outlines of reality.”
“Hard writing makes easy reading.”
“Creation is a knack which is empowered by practice, and like almost any skill, it is lost if you don't practice it.”
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“Ideas, of course, have a place in fiction, and any writer of fiction needs a mind. But ideas are not the best subject matter for fiction. They do not dramatize well. They are, rather, a by-p...”
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“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...”
“Talent lies around in us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them. The times are wrong, or their health...”
“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 an...”
“No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike.”
“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 elemen...”
“Hard writing makes easy reading.”
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