Thomas Wolfe Quotes

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

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

A stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces. – Thomas Wolfe

Culture is the widening of the mind and of the spirit. – Thomas Wolfe

Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth and listen. – Thomas Wolfe

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

To perceive – scrutinize – let go what our eyes see and our mind can contemplate – what our hand can learn to shape and form: this is the definition of great art. It was not to be had simply as a result of factory labor. It demanded passionate longing and abiding fidelity. – Thomas Wolfe

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. – Thomas Wolfe

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

We can love a fool and still love ourselves, but if we love a genius, we must be thoroughly humiliated. – Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Wolfe Quotes part 2

I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once. – Thomas Wolfe

For when we see the world as a whole, we do it inaccurately, because we are incapable of doing anything else. – Thomas Wolfe

I believe a story lives in all its tellings. – Thomas Wolfe

There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a woman in the act of cooking a meal for someone she loves. – Thomas Wolfe

I wanted to be a writer, that’s all, just write and write and write and beyond that I had no earthly idea. – Thomas Wolfe

If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water. – Thomas Wolfe

To a young girl, faith should be — in school, in community and in heaven. – Thomas Wolfe

There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves. – Thomas Wolfe

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 a triumph few men ever know. – Thomas Wolfe

Oh, God. The waste. The waste! – Thomas Wolfe

The mountains were his masters. – Thomas Wolfe

All that summer they dreamed all through the hot nights. And in the blazing noons, they dreamed again, through the long, lazy hours. – Thomas Wolfe

He was too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that, thanks to this artifice, we manage to endure the burden of the past. – Thomas Wolfe

Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth and listen. The voice of forest water in the night, a woman’s laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children’s voices in bright air — these things will never change. – Thomas Wolfe

Those who lift their heads, and they who bow them, there are no absolutes, but only the eye of the beholder. – Thomas Wolfe

Only in the act of glorying in what it believes to be called absolutely true, in the audacity and extremity of its scorn, can the human spirit dare the possibilities of derogation and travail which are its law. – Thomas Wolfe

We are not two worlds, I said; we belong to each other, and I no more look for the influences that shape you than I feel the sun on your side of the house as separate from mine. – Thomas Wolfe

She was lost in her longing to understand. – Thomas Wolfe

If a man has a talent and cannot use it, he has failed. – Thomas Wolfe

As the years pass, I am coming more and more to understand that it is the common, everyday blessings of our common everyday lives for which we should be particularly grateful. They are the things that fill our lives with comfort and our hearts with gladness. – Thomas Wolfe

What was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusiveness of life itself? – Thomas Wolfe

What other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s own mind! – Thomas Wolfe

To see one’s life as a pattern of themes, emotions, the ongoing composition in which all is allowed to come full circle—this is not merely clinical or chemical, this is dramatic and moving. – Thomas Wolfe

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

A child’s face across the street was filled with wonder. – Thomas Wolfe

Time, which sees all things, has found you out. – Thomas Wolfe

This may not be happiness, but it is greatness. – Thomas Wolfe

This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected–in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life. – Thomas Wolfe

What is bigness? It is a quality of the human type, not a subject matter to which all novelists must hold themselves forever. – Thomas Wolfe

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

Yet all the days of his life were captive days. – Thomas Wolfe

It’s not the things we label as inevitable that are really inexorable: they are moments and our responses, our responses and our responses, our longings and longings. – Thomas Wolfe

Hell had at last released itself in him; and life’s two great gifts – the capacity to love and the power to create – had both been taken from him at once. – Thomas Wolfe

Culture is the place where the inevitable begins to happen. – Thomas Wolfe

He smelled the fields of sweet swampland, with their precise and minute intimation of the sadness and satisfying travail of man’s life in its unfathomable emptiness. – Thomas Wolfe