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Thomas Wolfe Quotes

Total quotes: 20
“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, Look Homeward, Angel
Tagged: Hypocrisy, Pride, Hatred, mean, Truth
“I am, he thought, a part of all that I have touched and that has touched me, which, having for me no existence save that which I gave to it, became other than itself by being mixed with what I then was, and is now still otherwise, having fused with what I now am, which is itself a cumulation of what I have been becoming. Why here? Why there? Why now? Why then?”
— Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
Tagged: Thought, Existence, Philosophical
“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, The Web and the Rock
Tagged: Chance, Encounter, Meeting, Life, Fate, Destiny, Time, Sea
“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, The Web and the Rock
Tagged: City, Life, test, Prove, lost, Alone, Individuality
“Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose.”
— Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
Tagged: fiction, fact, purpose
“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, Look Homeward, Angel
Tagged: Sadness, lost, Loneliness, Stranger
“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, You Can't Go Home Again
Tagged: Earth, Change, endure
“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, Look Homeward, Angel
Tagged: moment, Time
“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, Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth
Tagged: Lover, Love, travel, Reminisce
“When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people- not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul, as evidenced by the innumerable strident words of abuse, hatred, contempt, mistrust, and scorn that forever grate upon our ears as the manswarm passes us in the streets -- we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness.”
— Thomas Wolfe, The Anatomy of Loneliness
Tagged: Moments, Unhappiness, Abuse, Hatred, contempt, Mistrust, Suffering, Loneliness
“The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.”
— Thomas Wolfe, The Anatomy of Loneliness
Tagged: Belief, Loneliness, Existence
“Peace fell upon her spirit. Strong comfort and assurance bathed her whole being. Life was so solid and splendid, and so good.”
— Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again
Tagged: Peace, Spirit, Comfort, Life
“His enemy was time. Or perhaps it was his friend. One never knows for sure.”
— Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again
Tagged: Time, Enemy, Friend, Uncertainty
“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, Look Homeward, Angel
Tagged: Mountains, Masters, Reality, Unity, Eternal Change
“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, You Can't Go Home Again
Tagged: Balance, World, Love, agreement
“Through Chance, we are each a ghost to all the others, and our only reality; through Chance, the huge hinge of the world, and a grain of dust; the stone that starts an avalanche, the pebble whose concentric circles widen across the seas.”
— Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
Tagged: Chance, Reality, impact
“And it was this that awed him — the weird combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time.”
— Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
Tagged: Fixity, Change, Life, Observe
“It was like a dream of hell, when a man finds his own name staring at him from the Devil's ledger; like a dream of death, when he who comes as mourner finds himself in the coffin, or as witness to a hanging, the condemned upon the scaffold.”
— Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
Tagged: Hell, Dream, Death
“Most of the time we think we're sick, it's all in the mind.”
— Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
Tagged: sickness, Mind and Body, Mind Over Matter
“Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.”
— Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again
Tagged: Mistakes, chances, Keep Going
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