Tara Verrette > Tara's Quotes

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#1

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water

tags: environment, nature, wilderness

303 likes

#2

“Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

tags: anchoring, attachment, belonging, home, homelessness, roots

256 likes

#3

“Wisdom. . .is knowing what you have to accept.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

tags: acceptance, wisdom

165 likes

#4

“It should not be denied... that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led West.”
― Wallace Stegner

137 likes

#5

“it is an easy mistake to think that non-talkers are non-feelers.”
― Wallace Stegner

tags: introversion

117 likes

#6

“She had rooms in her mind that she would not look into.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

82 likes

#7

“I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

tags: belonging, depth, familiarity, home, intimacy, shallowness

71 likes

#8

“Towns are like people. Old ones often have character, the new ones are interchangeable.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

tags: character, town

59 likes

#9

“One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water

tags: american-west, conservation, cooperation, environment, individualism, optimism

57 likes

#10

“It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one. Through friendships, we spark and inspire one another's ambitions.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

49 likes

#11

“If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c , anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me. I may even have contributed to it in minor ways, for culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone.
”
― Wallace Stegner, The American West as Living Space

28 likes

#12

“A writer is an organism that will go on writing even after its heart has been cut out.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

22 likes

#13

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . .”
― Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water

tags: conservation, inspirational, wilderness

31 likes

#14

“We are fossils in the making.”
― Wallace Stegner

26 likes

#15

“Faith can reclaim deserts as well as move mountains.”
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

27 likes

#16

“Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim’s Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn an man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else — pathway to the stars, maybe. I suspect that what makes hedonists so angry when they think about overachievers is that the overachievers, without benefit of drugs or orgies, have more fun.”
― Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety

34 likes

#17

“Somehow I should have been able to say how strong and resilient you were, what a patient and abiding and bonding force, the softness that proved in the long run stronger than what it seemed to yield to...You are at once a lasting presence and an unhealed wound.”
― Wallace Stegner

20 likes

#18

“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'. To hide from anything. That was Marian's text. Be open, be available, be exposed, be skinless. Skinless? Dance around in your bones.”
― Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things

24 likes

#19

“I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my books were always my friends, let fail all else.”
― Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone around the World

tags: alone, books, friends, solitude

3492 likes

#20

“Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it's not because they enjoy solitude. It's because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.”
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

tags: disappointment, loneliness, loner, solitude

11851 likes

#21

“My religion is nature. That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.”
― Oliver Sacks

tags: naturalist

404 likes

#22

“We speak not only to tell other people what we think, but to tell ourselves what we think. Speech is a part of thought.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

tags: blindness, cognition, communication, community, senses, sociality, speech, thought

395 likes

#23

“To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see over-all patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or, at least, the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology, or in states of mind that allow us to travel to other worlds, to rise above our immediate surroundings.

We may seek, too, a relaxing of inhibitions that makes it easier to bond with each other, or transports that make our consciousness of time and mortality easier to bear. We seek a holiday from our inner and outer restrictions, a more intense sense of the here and now, the beauty and value of the world we live in.”
― Oliver Sacks

tags: consciousness, day-to-day, escape, explanation, freedom, future, hope, human-beings, inhibitions, life, living, meaning, patterns, transcendence, transport, understanding

196 likes

#24

“If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us--through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives--we are each of us unique.”
― Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

tags: biology, human-condition, humanity, individuality, uniqueness

231 likes

#25

“I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.

Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
― Oliver Sacks, Gratitude

tags: death, gratitude, inspirational, life, love, oliver-sacks, thinking

231 likes

#26

“There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.”
― Leonard Cohen, Selected Poems, 1956-1968

tags: hope, light

3079 likes

#27

“Instead of worrying about what you cannot control, shift your energy to what you can create.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart: Inspirational Thoughts for Living Your Best Life

tags: creation, creative, inspiration, inspirational, inspirational-attitude, inspirational-life, inspirational-quotes, inspire, inspiring, life, life-and-living, life-lessons, life-quotes, living, optimism, optimistic, positive, positive-affirmation, positive-life, positive-thinking, worry

8791 likes

#28

“Don't be pushed around by the fears in your mind. Be led by the dreams in your heart.”
― Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart: Inspirational Thoughts for Living Your Best Life

tags: dreams, fearless, heart, inspiration, inspirational, inspirational-attitude, inspirational-life, inspirational-quotes, inspire, inspiring, life, life-and-living, life-lessons, life-quotes, living, mind, motivation, motivational, optimism, optimistic, positive, positive-affirmation, positive-life, positive-thinking

9849 likes

#29

“It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.”
― Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things

tags: anarchy, conduct-of-life, life, rules, society

107 likes

#30

“There is a sense in which we are all each other's consequences.”
― Wallace Stegner, All the Little Live Things

85 likes

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