Thomas Wolfe Quotes

“This was the only shame he felt. And this shame was so great in him that he wondered if all his life thereafter would be long enough to wash out of his brain and blood and the last pollution of its loathsome taint. And yet, he would have it thought that he was bitter.”

“He had learned that he could not devour the earth, that he must know and accept his limitations.”

“He realized that much of his torment of the years past had been self-inflicted, and an inevitable part of growing up.”

“But they did not say the things they knew. And they knew everything. They had seen everything. They had accepted everything. And they received every new intelligence now with a cynical and amused look in their untelling eyes.”

“Their tales of woe and fear unspeakable gushed forth and beat upon my ears. They told me stories of their friends and relatives who had said unguarded things in public and disappeared without a trace, stories of the Gestapo, stories of neighbours’ quarrels and petty personal spite turned into political persecution, stories of concentration camps and pogroms, stories of rich Jews stripped and beaten and robbed of everything they had and then denied the right to earn a pauper’s wage”

“It was a friendship founded on many common tastes and interests, on mutual like and admiration of each for what the other was, and an attitude of respect which allowed unhampered expression of opinion even on those rare subjects which aroused differences of views and of belief. It was, therefore, the kind of friendship that can exist only between two men.”

“Loneliness, far from being a rare and curious circumstance, is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of man.”

“Don’t let them slow you down. Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.”

“And, most important of all for one who had taken so long to grow up, he thought he had learned not to be the slave to his emotions.”

“He was so infinitely patient, so unflaggingly hopeful of George’s improvement, so unfailingly good-natured and courteous, that no one could possibly have been angry or failed to try to mend his ways.”

“They spent many hours together, wonderful hours of endless talk, so free and full that it combed the universe and bound the two of them together in bonds of closest friendship.”

“That is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.”

“The simple joy he felt at being once more a part of such familiar things also contained an element of strangeness and unreality. With a sharp stab of wonder he reminded himself, as he had done a hundred times in the last few weeks, that he had really come home again —”

“Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America—that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.”

“Nothing shocked them anymore. It was the way things were. It was what they had come to expect of life . . . He himself had not yet come to that, he did not want to come to it.”

“McHarg, it is true, was a great man, a man famous throughout the world, a man who had now attained the highest pinnacle of success to which a writer could aspire. But on just this account his disillusionment and disappointment must have been so much the greater and the more crushing.”

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

“The human mind is a fearful instrument of adaptation, and in nothing is this more clearly shown than in its mysterious powers of resilience, self-protection, and self-healing.”

“We call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.”

“The air was strangely quiet. All the noises of the city were muted here into a distant hum, so unceasing that it seemed to belong to silence.”

“It was a disappointment that all men know —the artist most of all. The disappointment of reaching for the flower and having it fade the moment your fingers touch it.”