Thomas Wolfe Quotes

Quotes about:

• Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.

  Thomas Wolfe

  Mistake, Silly, Looks

  Thomas Wolfe (2011). “You Can't Go Home Again”, p.489, Simon and Schuster

  76 Copy quote

• You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.

  Thomas Wolfe

  Life, Success, Money

  "Personal Quotes/ Biography". www.imdb.com.

  109 Copy quote

• 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

  Loneliness, Solitary Life, Facts

  94 Copy quote

• Something has spoken to me in the night...and told me that I shall die, I know not where. Saying: "[Death is] to lose the earth you know for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth.

  Thomas Wolfe

  Home, Night, Land

  82 Copy quote

• All things belonging to the earth will never change-the leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again, the trees whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and the dust of lovers long since buried in the earth-all things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth-these things will always be the same, for they come up from the earth that never changes, they go back into the earth that lasts forever. Only the earth endures, but it endures forever.

  Thomas Wolfe

  Flower, Sleep, Dark

  Thomas Wolfe (2011). “You Can't Go Home Again”, p.39, Simon and Schuster

  90 Copy quote

• Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.

  Thomas Wolfe

  Life, Escaping, Romance

  67 Copy quote

• I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.

  Thomas Wolfe

  Thousand

  Thomas Wolfe (2016). “You Can't Go Home Again”, p.360, Thomas Wolfe

  71 Copy quote

• ...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

  Memories, Home, Dark

  61 Copy quote

• 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

  Country, Time, America

  Thomas Wolfe (1999). “Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth”, p.176, Simon and Schuster

  74 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Suffering, Finals

  Thomas Wolfe, Maxwell Evarts Perkins, Matthew Joseph Bruccoli, Park Bucker (2000). “To Loot My Life Clean: The Thomas Wolfe--Maxwell Perkins Correspondence”, p.21, Univ of South Carolina Press

  79 Copy quote

• 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

  Summer, Fall, Sadness

  29 Copy quote

• 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

  Love, Wall, Home

  Thomas Wolfe (1999). “Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth”, p.344, Simon and Schuster

  91 Copy quote

• 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

  Dream, Heart, Son

  Thomas Wolfe (2016). “You Can't Go Home Again”, p.524, Thomas Wolfe

  81 Copy quote

• But why had he always felt so strongly the magnetic pull of home, why had he thought so much about it and remembered it with such blazing accuracy, if it did not matter, and if this little town, and the immortal hills around it, was not the only home he had on earth? He did not know. All that he knew was that the years flow by like water, and that one day men come home again.

  Thomas Wolfe

  Home, Men, Years

  Thomas Wolfe (2011). “You Can't Go Home Again”, p.77, Simon and Schuster

  75 Copy quote

• The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be…. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever.

  Thomas Wolfe

  Book, Heart, Numbers

  Thomas Wolfe (1999). “Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth”, p.115, Simon and Schuster

  71 Copy quote

• There is one voyage, the first, the last, the only one.

  Thomas Wolfe

  Travel, Lasts, Firsts

  Thomas Wolfe, Arlyn Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph Bruccoli (2000). “O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life”, p.661, Univ of South Carolina Press

  27 Copy quote

• 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

  Strong, Men, Mad

  Thomas Wolfe (1999). “Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth”, p.460, Simon and Schuster

  12 Copy quote

• 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

  Heart, Cities, People

  64 Copy quote

• 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

  Children, Moving, Healing

  Thomas Wolfe, Arlyn Bruccoli, Matthew Joseph Bruccoli (2000). “O Lost: A Story of the Buried Life”, p.538, Univ of South Carolina Press

  12 Copy quote

• Making the world safe for hypocrisy.

  Thomas Wolfe

  Army, Hypocrisy, Navy

  Look Homeward, Angel pt. 3, ch. 36 (1929) SeeWoodrowWilson 15

  46 Copy quote

• There came to him an image of man’s whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all man’s life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, and that all man’s grandeur, tragic dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew his life was little and would be extinguished, and that only darkness was immense and everlasting. And he knew that he would die with defiance on his lips, and that the shout of his denial would ring with the last pulsing of his heart into the maw of all-engulfing night.

  Thomas Wolfe

  Heart, Night, Men

  53 Copy quote

• [T]he essence of belief is doubt, the essence of reality is questioning. The essence of Time is Flow, not Fix. The essence of faith is the knowledge that all flows and that everything must change. The growing man is Man Alive, and his "philosophy" must grow, must flow, with him. . . . the man too fixed today, unfixed tomorrow - and his body of beliefs is nothing but a series of fixations.

  Thomas Wolfe

  Philosophy, Reality, Men

  29 Copy quote

• 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

  Struggle, Reality, Unity

  Thomas Wolfe (2006). “Look Homeward, Angel”, p.156, Simon and Schuster

  52 Copy quote

• There’s no sight on earth more appealing than that of a woman making dinner for someone she loves.

  Thomas Wolfe

  Love, Food, Sight

  27 Copy quote

• 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

  Lying, Our World, Agreement

  Thomas Wolfe (2016). “You Can't Go Home Again”, p.748, Thomas Wolfe

  44 Copy quote

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