The Sound of Mountain Water Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“harshly and beautifully colored, broken and worn until its bones are exposed, its great sky without a smudge or taint from Technocracy, and in hidden corners and pockets under its cliffs the sudden poetry of springs.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water: The Changing American West

“like the discomforts of a camping trip that become hilarious in the telling, the verbal formulation of distress has the capacity to cure it.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water: The Changing American West

“But those who live by the myth, or pretend to, have never admitted that they live in a land of little rain and big consequences. Whether they are angrily protesting the setting-aside of areas of permanent wilderness, or trying to maneuver timber, oil, coal, mineral, or grazing lands away from the federal bureaus that protect them in the public interest, or speculating in oil-lease auctions or options in the water of federal reservoirs, they represent the survival of the gospel that left to its own devices would already have reduced a good part of the West to a desert as barren as Syria.”
― Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water: The Changing American West