Thomas Wolfe Quotes

You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.

Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.

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.

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.

The future was with Fate. The present was our own.

The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. 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.

To perceive, in a flash, a vista of interrelated facts, is to experience the exhilaration and the exaltation of a poet or seer.

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 Quotes part 2

That which has been is eternal-for it is past.

He called himself ‘a vegetable of the people’.

In the immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come — but what is more serious still, is that we cannot really be sure whether Godot is there for us to wait for him.

Waiting for Godot means waiting for Waiters to serve Him when He shows up.

Man is waiting for a Godot who has not yet arrived and may not arrive at all. Meanwhile they are preparing themselves as well as they can for the work.

There are always reasons for killing people. Things get done in this world without morals.

All we do to each other is make people bleed. We’re in the blood business.

I felt plenty of hate in that room. I’ve had enough of hate to last me a lifetime. There is no niche for hate and no wall to his it in.

Anyone who thinks that death can make people ‘fade away’ without disappearing is wrong! I’ve seen a lot of corpses. For thousands of years you will still see people represented with hands on their breasts or on their tummies to suggest that the living come out of nothingness and return to it.

Every job and every profession has its paradigmatic suicide. He is the one who often detonates the dynamite of words that shake the collective conscience. Their names are, as they say, legion.

When Lenin died the authorities did not have faith. People noticed, all over the world, that the authorities behaved like workers who automatically shift a gear if there is an engine-driver present in the cabin.

Sartre, from what I know of him- interrupted the little girl- has no shame about using bad language. He calls women ‘holes’! Is he not gentlemen at all?

Wars only happen in people’s heads.

We just won’t think of that now; yes, we’ll wander under the flowers and if we get tired, we’ll play hap, one hap, but we’ll talk about you all the same; that will pass the time away.

Anyone can tell you what ought to be: the great thing is to see what is and do it.

You have to be there in order to understand.

Names matter; things can get called anything and then forgotten.

For The Masses wounds are sacred.

The past is never where you think you left it.

You must Cromwell him a little. . . . You must be temporary dictators.

The biggest mistake Alger Hiss ever made was knowing me.

Who can I blame but Time?

Writin’ is like shavun-when you’re in the middle of it, you shay awake all night.

If you say ‘goblin’ at night, they’ll shove your dead body into a hole.

I’m sorry for them, alright. They’ve only got once chance to live, we’ve got two.

God lets us love someone with all our hearts, then lets them die like dogs.

We’re lonely because we’re out of touch with reality.

We’ve gone so far that our minds would break when we saw the path back.

Rest a weary mind in her healing arms.

I’m talkin about the secret languge of the soul. I’m talkin language that has no words, just feelings.

Because I always say what a mad world it must be when a man doesn’t know who he is. It must be a unreasonable worl, don’t you reckon?

Look homeward angel now I see you stand before me, and I am stricken dumb.

A genius catches fire first and burns afterward.

If Mary excelled in nothing else, she was uncannily expert on the brilliant.

For all of us are lonely and neither the social architects nor the villagers are willing to concede that we are.

To every youth there comes a time of sorrows, when life seems burned out at its core; hemmed in by a visionless future, he sees his many roads all worn and useless, all leading back.

Even in man who does not aspire to knowledge, as well as in whom it shines forth and is enlightened, there is a certain ascent of the soul to a higher nature. He is then lighter and burns brighter.

Every great light rolls forward on the wheels of grief; heave them down to set him free.

For at the peak of its highest flight the beaming angel genius no longer feels clouded and dim as earth, and he with the glorious spirit rises into the sphere of ethereal light.

To create is the only thing that saves a man from his desperate plight.

But you are bored of harsh, sober books that anguishes your perils as an ideology leads you backward to lost shores.

I will always be thankful for your love, for being faithful to me even when I am at my worst. You are my rock, my inspiration, and my joy.