Wallace Stegner Quotes

A five-hour flight works out to three days and nights on land, by rail, from sea to shining sea. You can chalk off the hours on the back of the seat ahead. But seventy-some hours will not seem so long to you if you tell yourself first: This is where I am going to be for the rest of my natural life.

Our vulgar perception is not concerned with other than vulgar phenomena.

When a traveler returneth home, let him not leave the countries where he hath traveled altogether behind him.

Travel by air is not travel at all, but simply a change of location; so my wife and daughter and I went to San Francisco by train, leaving Boston on a Wednesday morning in June and, then after lunch in New York, boarding Amtrak's Broadway to Chicago.

Of course, one cannot get to know a country like the United States in short visits.

I perceive that we inhabitants of New England live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface ofthings. We think that that is which appears to be.

You can drive 1,000 miles across America and find yourself, whereas if you drive a few miles from Slough you're in London anyway, or you hit Wales and you're in another country! Also, wherever you are in England it's still raining.

When we get these thruways across the whole country, as we will and must, it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.

Vulgar and inactive minds confound familiarity with knowledge, and conceive themselves informed of the whole nature of things, when they are shown their form or told their use.

it still astounds me, after forty years, that there is no good bread between Chicago and San Francisco.

If we go somewhere on foot, we know the way perfectly, whereas if we go by car or airplane, we are hardly there at all. It becomes merely a dream.

A day will come when all nations on our continent will form a European brotherhood... A day will come when we shall see... the United States of America and the United States of Europe face to face, reaching out for each other across the seas.

The world can doubtless never be well known by theory: practice is absolutely necessary; but surely it is of great use to a young man, before he sets out for that country, full of mazes, windings, and turnings, to have at least a general map of it, made by some experienced traveler.

Every child in America should be acquainted with his own country. He should read books that furnish him with ideas that will be useful to him in life and practice. As soon as he opens his lips, he should rehearse the history of his own country.

Men seldom think deeply on subjects in which they have no choice of opinion: they are fearful of encountering obstacles to their faith--as in religion--and so are content with the surface.

France is a country you have to drive through to get to Italy. That's all it's there for.

Most men are rich in borrowed sufficiency: a man may very well say a good thing, give a good answer, cite a good sentence, without at all seeing the force of either the one or the other.

And the voices in the waves are always whispering to Florence, in their ceaseless murmuring, of love - of love, eternal and illimitable, not bounded by the confines of this world, or by the end of time, but ranging still, beyond the sea, beyond the sky, to the invisible country far away!

If you cross the Atlantic with an American lady you invariably fall in love with her before the journey is over. Travel with the same woman in a railway car for twelve hours, and you will have written her down in your own mind in quite other language than that of love.

The problem is that I know the textbook answers to any question you care to ask.

America is a country obsessed with appearance. It's a country obsessed with looks.

Along the iron veins that traverse the frame of our country, beat and flow the fiery pulses of its exertion, hotter and faster every hour. All vitality is concentrated through those throbbing arteries into the central cities; the country is passed over like a green sea by narrow bridges, and we are thrown back in continually closer crowds on the city gates.

Splendid to arrive alone in a foreign country and feel the assault of difference. Here they are all along, busy with living; they don't talk or look like me. The rhythm of their day is entirely different; I am foreign.

before one actually visits them, everyone tends to think of their favorite countries as one grand Disneyland filled with national monuments and historical treasures conveniently laid out for easy viewing, when what they really are filled with, of course, is people going to work, laundromats and places to buy rat poison.

If you ever plan to motor west, travel my way, take the highway that is best. Get your kicks, on Route Sixty-six.