Wallace Stegner Quotes

You are born and then you die, but in between you can do anything you want. It's society that creates rules for us, but you can break out of that.

One's philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes... and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.

In these words lies all his power: He chose the path along which he is walking and so has no complaints.

God writes the story of our lives with the pen strokes of our own free choices.

I believe we've been given free will, and we can take responsibility for our own lives and for creating our own environments - which I think at times can be a little much for people to deal with.

You choose the life you want for yourself, and then you just shut up and go about it. That's how I've lived my life.

We make choices. No one else can live our lives for us. And we must confront and accept the consequences of our actions.

To a woman who complained about her destiny the Master said, "It is you who make your destiny." "But surely I am not responsible for being born a woman?" "Being born a woman isn't destiny. That is fate. Destiny is how you accept your womanhood and what you make of it."

I think life is a matter of choices and that wherever we are, good or bad, is because of choices we make.

A life lived of choice is a life of conscious action. A life lived of chance is a life of unconscious creation.

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours.

I believe that fate is choices - it's not chance.

Ideas matter. The world matters. Our lives matter, and the choices we make as we navigate our lives perhaps matter most of all.

Only you can control your future.

Life will always be to a large extent what we ourselves make it.

I've always felt that life is a novel, and part of it is written for you, and part of it is written by you. It's up to you to write the ending, ultimately.

It is entirely up to us to invent our own lives.

Everybody is dealt a hand of cards. It was my choice to play them the way I played them.

I believe that we are solely responsible for our choices, and we have to accept the consequences of every deed, word, and thought throughout our lifetime.

You decide the things that ultimately you do. You have choices in this world, and that's how I live.

You are where you are today because you have chosen to be there.

People are where they are because that is exactly where they really want to be - whether they will admit that or not.

My grand uncle was a traditional priest, and he would always say to me as a kid, 'We stand in our own light,' which essentially for him meant we were entirely responsible for a lot of what happens to us and for the ways in which our lives play out.

I've always felt like we're all human beings and we're all basically given the tools to make whatever choices we want to make. How we treat other people. How we treat ourselves. Just the whole philosophy of that and the philosophical logic of that is that we're all capable of great acts of evil, and we're all capable of great acts of good.

We need to teach the next generation of children from day one that they are responsible for their lives. Mankind's greatest gift, also its greatest curse, is that we have free choice. We can make our choices built from love or from fear.