WHAT A CHILDHOOD OF SUFFERING GIVES YOU

'For her sake I have regretted that miserable homestead, and blamed my father for the blind and ignorant lemming-impulse that brought us to it. But on my own account I would not have missed it - could not have missed it and be who I am, for better or worse. How better could a boy have known loneliness, which I must think a good thing to know? Who ever can came more truly face to face with beauty than a boy who in a waste of characterless grass and burnouts came upon the first pale primrose on the coulee bank, or on some day of great coasting clouds looked across acres of flax in bloom? Why, short of exile, would anyone ever submit to the vast geometry of sky and earth, to the glare and heat, to the withering winds? But how else could he have met the mystery of nights when the stars were scoured clean and the prairie was full of breathings from a long way off, and the strange, friendly barking of night-hunting owls?'

Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow, p.281.

THE INTIMATE ACT OF MAKING A PATH

'Wearing any such path in the earth's rind is an intimate act, an act like love, and it is denied to the dweller in cities.'

Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow, p.273.

THE POWER OF PLACE

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

Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow, p.21.

THE CHALLENGE OF COMPLIMENTING SOMEONE FOR SOMETHING FUNDAMENTAL

'Obviously I have not got through a long life without praising people - their houses, their gardens, their wives, their children, their political opinions, quite often their writing. But though I have liked a lot of people and loved a few, I have never been much good as telling them so, or telling them why. The more my admiration goes out to a man or woman personally, and not to some performance or accomplishment, the harder it is for me to express. The closer I come to fundamental values and beliefs, the closer I come to reticence. It is a more naked act for me to tell someone I am impressed by his principles and his integrity than to say I like his book or his necktie.' 

Wallace Stegner, 'A Letter to Wendell Berry' in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, p.207. 

THE PROBLEM WITH SIMPLICITY

‘That was the trouble, he thought ruefully, about trying to take refuge in simplicity. The lovers of the simple were too inevitably complex.’

Wallace Stegner, Second Growth, p.208. 

HOME

'Well, where is home? he said. It isn't where your family comes from, and it isn't where you were born, unless you have been lucky enough to live in one place all your life. Home is where you hang your hat. (He had never owned a hat). Or home is where you spent your childhood, the good years when waking every morning was an excitement, when the round of the day could always produce something to fill your mind, tear your emotions, excite your wonder or awe or delight. Is home that, or is it the place where the people you love live, or the place where you have buried your dead, or the place where you want to be buried yourself?'

Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, p.459.  

MARRIAGE

'...their eyes jumped to meet each other, and it seemed to me that all of a sudden I could see what living together twenty-five years can do to two people. They asked and answered a dozen questions in that one look.'

Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, p.440. 

FAMILY

'If a man could understand himself and his own family, Bruce thought, he'd have a good start toward understanding everything he'd ever need to know.'

Wallace Stegner, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, p.436. 

MEMORY

'...his memory was a sloppy housekeeper, and had trouble concentrating on one thing at a time.' 

Wallace Stegner, Recapitulation, p.86. 

MEMORY

'....that single miserable evening, with its hatred of him, its loyalty to her, and its self-pity for himself all intact, hung in his head as unalterable as a room that disappears when a switch is touched, and appears again the the moment the switch is turned back on. He hadn't turned on the light in that room for years but there it still was, implacable.' 

Wallace Stegner, Recapitulation, p.50. 

ADOLESCENCE

'What a....wiring job a man was! How enduring were the circuits stamped into a boy when he was dizzy with hormones and as vulnerable to experience as dry blotting paper to water! Push the right button and you floodlighted him like the temple. Push another and you got the whole son et lumiere.'

Wallace Stegner, Recapitulation, p.26. 

LIFE

'The life we all live is amateurish and accidental; it begins in accident and proceeds by trial and error toward dubious ends. That is the law of nature. But the dream of man will not accept what nature hands us. We have to tinker with it, trying to give it purpose, direction, meaning - or, if we are of another turn of mind, trying to demonstrate that it has no purpose direction, or meaning. Either way, we can't let it alone. The unexamined life, as the wise Greek said, is not worth living. We have to examine it, if only to persuade ourselves that we matter, and are in control, or that we are at least aware of what is being done to us. Autobiography and fiction are variant means to the same end.'

Wallace Stegner, 'The Law of Nature and the Dream of Man' in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, p.219.

FRIENDSHIP

'What does more to stay us and keep our backbones stiff while the world reels around us than the sense that we are linked with someone who listens and understands and so in some way completes us?'

Wallace Stegner, The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner, p.i.

PLACE

'...a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it - have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.'

Wallace Stegner, 'The Sense of Place' in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, p.201.

PEOPLE

'We are creatures shaped by our experiences; we like what we know, more often than we know what we like.'

Wallace Stegner, 'Thoughts in a Dry Land' in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, p.53.

AGE

'Age and experience have not made me a Nestor qualified to tell others about how to live their lives. I feel more like more like Theodore Dreiser, who confessed that he would depart from life more bewildered than he had arrived in it. Instead of being embittered, or stoical, or calm, or resigned, or any of the standard things that a long life might have made me, I confess that I am often simply lost, as much in need of comfort, understanding, forgiveness, uncritical love - the things you used to give me - as I ever was at five, or ten.'  

Wallace Stenger, 'Letter, Much Too Late' in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West, p.22.

LOVE

‘Love is a carrier of death – the only thing, in fact, that makes death significant.’

Wallace Stegner, All the Little Living Things, p.91.

PAIN

‘One thing I have learned hard, if indeed I have learned it now: it is a reduction of our humanity to hide from pain, our own or others’.’

Wallace Stegner, All the Little Living Things, p.12.

TIME

‘The days dripped away like honey off a spoon.’

Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things, p.9.

MARRIAGE

'The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark. But Ruth is right. It is something - it can be everything - to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below; a fellow bird whom you can look after and find bugs and seeds for; one who will patch your bruises and straighten your ruffled feathers and mourn over your hurts when you accidently fly into something you can't handle.' 

Wallace Stegner, The Spectator Bird, p.213.