Wallace Stegner

Quotes

• “It is a better world with some buffalo left in it, a richer world with some gorgeous canyons unmarred by signboards, hot-dog stands, super highways, or high-tension lines, undrowned by power or irrigation reservoirs. If we preserved as parks only those places that have no economic possibilities, we would have no parks. And in the decades to come, it will not be only the buffalo and the trumpeter swan who need sanctuaries. Our own species is going to need them too. It needs them now.”
• “It has never been man’s gift to make wildernesses. But he can make deserts, and has.”
• “There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences.”
• “If the national park idea is, as Lord Bryce suggested, the best idea America ever had, wilderness preservation is the highest refinement of that idea.”
• “The national park idea, the best idea we ever had, was inevitable as soon as Americans learned to confront the wild continent not with fear and cupidity but with delight, wonder, and awe.”
• “It is a lovely and terrible wilderness, such as wilderness as Christ and the prophets went out into; harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge of taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Key facts

Born

Wallace Earle Stegner , ( 1909-02-18 ) February 18, 1909, Lake Mills, Iowa , U.S.

Died

April 13, 1993 (1993-04-13) (aged 84), Santa Fe, New Mexico , U.S.

Occupation

Historian novelist short story writer environmentalist

Education

University of Utah ( BA ), University of Iowa ( MA , PhD )

Period

1937–1993

Notable awards

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction , (1972, Angle of Repose ), National Book Award for Fiction , (1977, The Spectator Bird ), Fulbright Scholar to Greece, 1963

Spouse

Mary Stuart Page (1934–1993)

Children

Page Stegner

via Wikipedia infobox