Wallace Stegner Quotes

Dead we become the lumber of the world.

I would rather be ashes than dust.

Man passes away; his name perishes from record and recollection; his history is as a tale that is told, and his very monument becomes a ruin.

But ah! what once has been shall be no more! The groaning earth in travail and in pain Brings forth its races, but does not restore, And the dead nations never rise again.

History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.

While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery.

Books are not life, only its ashes.

Stone, steel, dominions pass, Faith too, no wonder; So leave alone the grass That I am under.

Time is a great ocean which, like the other ocean, overflows with our remains.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

It's the decomposition that gets me. You spend your whole life looking after your body. And then you rot away.

I hate to say this, but I'll repeat it: After death, all we know that you do is stink.

Everything dies, from the smallest blade of grass to the biggest galaxy.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

I think that's what we're all most terrified about: that we'll just die and disappear and we'll leave no trace.

You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.

Even if you live forty or fifty years in this world, and then die, you cannot take all your goods with you.

Time is death.

Lies here food for the worms yet the work shall not be lost.

Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.

I'm going to die one day. I know it's coming for me, too. I'll be a mountain, I'll be a stone on the beach. I'll be nourishment.

The letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography.

The Flower that once has blown forever dies.

In a way, the whole tangible universe itself is a vast residue, a skeleton of countless lives that have germinated in it and have left it, leaving behind them only a trifling, infinitesimal part of their riches.

I always think that in some way, art is the best tool we have to prepare for death. It's like a sculpture that you can interpret differently every time you look at it.