Top 66 Thomas Wolfe Quotes
#1. We do not want to be told what we know. We do not want to call things by their names, although we're willing to call one another bad ones. We call meanness nobility and hatred honor. The way to make yourself a hero is to make me out a scoundrel. You won't admit that either, but it's true.
Thomas Wolfe
#2. My dear, dear girl [ ... ] we can't turn back the days that have gone. We can't turn life back to the hours when our lungs were sound, our blood hot, our bodies young. We are a flash of fire
a brain, a heart, a spirit. And we are three-cents-worth of lime and iron
which we cannot get back.
Thomas Wolfe
#3. So all were gone at last, one by one, each swept out into the mighty flood tide of the city's life, there to prove, to test, to find, to lose himself, as each man must--alone.
Thomas Wolfe
#4. Then summer fades and passes and October comes. We'll smell smoke then, and feel an unexpected sharpness, a thrill of nervousness, swift elation, a sense of sadness and departure.
Thomas Wolfe
#5. There's no need for algebra where two and two make five.
Thomas Wolfe
#7. The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change.
Thomas Wolfe
#8. It seems to me that in the orbit of our world you are the North Pole, I the South
so much in balance, in agreement
and yet ... the whole world lies between.
Thomas Wolfe
#9. Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.
Thomas Wolfe
#10. I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found. And this belief, which mounts now to the catharsis of knowledge and conviction, is for me
and I think for all of us
not only our own hope, but America's everlasting, living dream.
Thomas Wolfe
#11. I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.
Thomas Wolfe
#12. McGuire's meaty shoulders recoiled burlily as if from the cold shock of water.
Thomas Wolfe
#13. Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores.
Thomas Wolfe
#14. A stick is not only wood but the negation of wood. It is the meeting in space of wood and no-wood. A stick is finite and unextended wood, a fact determined by its own denial.
Thomas Wolfe
#15. If a man has talent and can't use it, he's failed. If he uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he uses the whole of it, he has succeeded, and won a satisfaction and triumph few men ever know.
Thomas Wolfe
#16. There is one voyage, the first, the last, the only one.
Thomas Wolfe
#17. America - it is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.
Thomas Wolfe
#18. I had not yet learned that one cannot really be superior without humility and tolerance and human understanding. I did not yet know that in order to belong to a rare and higher breed one must first develop the true power and talent of selfless immolation.
Thomas Wolfe
#19. There's no sight on earth more appealing than that of a woman making dinner for someone she loves.
Thomas Wolfe
#20. If a man has a talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and only uses half of it, he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns to use the whole of it, he has gloriously succeeded, and won a satisfaction and triumph few men will know. - Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Wolfe
#21. (Baseball's a dull game, really; that's the reason that it is so good. We do not love the game so much as we love the sprawl and drowse and shirt-sleeved apathy of it.)
Thomas Wolfe
#22. Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into the nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.
Thomas Wolfe
#23. Few of the university's sons had been distinguished in the nation's life--there had been an obscure President of the United States, and a few Cabinet members, but few had sought such distinction: it was glory enough to be a great man in one's State. Nothing beyond mattered very much.
Thomas Wolfe
#24. Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don't freeze up.
Thomas Wolfe
#25. Her lack of magnificence in a magnificent world
Thomas Wolfe
#26. This is man, who, if he can remember ten golden moments of joy and happiness out of all his years, ten moments unmarked by care, unseamed by aches or itches, has power to lift himself with his expiring breath and say: I have lived upon this earth and known glory!
Thomas Wolfe
#27. Eugene looked with passionate devotion at that grand old head, calm, wise and comforting. In a moment of vision, he saw that, for him, here was the last of those giants to whom we give the faith of our youth, believing like children that the riddle of our lives may be solved by their quiet judgment.
Thomas Wolfe
#28. A slow trickle of lust crawled painfully down the parched gully of desire, and ended feebly in dry fumbling lechery.
Thomas Wolfe
#30. The old hunger for voyages fed at his heart ... To go alone ... into strange cities; to meet strange people and to pass again before they could know him; to wander, like his own legend, across the earth
it seemed to him there could be no better thing than that.
Thomas Wolfe
#31. What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish.
Thomas Wolfe
#32. All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.
Thomas Wolfe
#33. And who shall say
whatever disenchantment follows
that we ever forget magic; or that we can ever betray, on this leaden earth, the apple-tree, the singing, and the gold?
Thomas Wolfe
#34. There is no happy land. There is no end to hunger.
Thomas Wolfe
#35. In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying the darkness and we know no death.
Thomas Wolfe
#37. He was like a man who stands upon a hill above the town he had left, yet does not say 'The town is near,' but turns his eyes upon the distant soaring ranges.
Thomas Wolfe
#38. The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.
Thomas Wolfe
#39. By God, I shall spend the rest of my life getting my heart back, healing and forgetting every scar you put upon me when I was a child. The first move I ever made, after the cradle, was to crawl for the door, and every move I have made since has been an effort to escape.
Thomas Wolfe
#41. Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose.
Thomas Wolfe
#42. Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good.
Thomas Wolfe
#44. out of death, life, out of the coarse rank earth, a flower.
Thomas Wolfe
#45. The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
Thomas Wolfe
#46. He knew he would always be the sad one: caged in that little round of skull, imprisoned in that beating and most secret heart, his life must always walk down lonely passages. Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know any one,
Thomas Wolfe
#47. Out of the nameless and unfathomed weavings of billion-footed life, out of the dark abyss of time and duty, blind chance had brought these two together on a ship, and their first meeting had been upon the timeless and immortal seas that beat forever at the shores of the old earth.
Thomas Wolfe
#48. Peace fell upon her spirit. Strong comfort and assurance bathed her whole being. Life was so solid and splendid, and so good.
Thomas Wolfe
#49. Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.
Thomas Wolfe
#50. Most of the time we think we're sick, it's all in the mind.
Thomas Wolfe
#51. You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.
Thomas Wolfe
#52. The dark ancestral cave, the womb from which mankind emerged into the light, forever pulls one back - but ... you can't go home again ... you can't go ... back home to the escapes of
Time and Memory. You Can't Go Home Again
Thomas Wolfe
#53. Man is born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must deny it all along the way.
Thomas Wolfe
#55. We are the sum of all the moments in our lives - all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape it or conceal it.
Thomas Wolfe
#56. There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.
Thomas Wolfe
#57. And this haunting and lonely memory is due probably to the combination of two things: the ghastly imitation of swarming life and metropolitan gaiety in the scene, and the almost total absence of life itself.
Thomas Wolfe
#59. A young man is so strong, so mad, so certain, and so lost. He has everything and he is able to use nothing.
Thomas Wolfe
#60. Was it in woman's nature to be content with all that a man could give her, and not forever want what was not his to give?
Thomas Wolfe
#61. Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.
Thomas Wolfe
#62. Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time.
Thomas Wolfe
#63. I don't know yet what I am capable of doing, but, by God, I have genius
I know it too well to blush behind it.
Thomas Wolfe
#64. Death the last voyage, the longest, and the best.
Thomas Wolfe
#65. A sect, incidentally, is a religion with no political power.
Thomas Wolfe
#66. Toil on, son, and do not lose heart or hope. Let nothing you dismay. You are not utterly forsaken. I, too, am here
here in the darkness waiting, here attentive, here approving of your labor and your dream.
Thomas Wolfe
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