Thomas Wolfe quotes - page 2

So, then, to every man his chance-to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining, golden opportunity-to every man the right to live, to work, to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him - this, seeker, is the promise of America. (Thomas Wolfe)
Go, seeker, if you will, throughout the land and you will find us burning in the night. View quote
Thomas Wolfe
What Christ is saying always, what he never swerves from saying, what he says a thousand times and in a thousand different ways, but always with a central unity of belief, is this: "I am my Father's son, and you are my brothers." And the unity that binds us all together, that makes this earth a family, and all men brothers and the sons of God, is love. View quote
Thomas Wolfe
Nacreous pearl light swam faintly about the hem of the lilac darkness; the edges of light and darkness were stitched upon the hills. Morning moved like a pearl-gray tide across the fields and up the hillflanks, flowing rapidly down into the soluble dark. View quote
Thomas Wolfe
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. View quote
Thomas Wolfe
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. View quote
Thomas Wolfe
He who lets himself be whored by fashion will be whored by time. View quote
Thomas Wolfe
I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once. View quote
Thomas Wolfe
What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish. View quote
Thomas Wolfe
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. View quote
Thomas Wolfe
Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don't freeze up. (Thomas Wolfe)
O lost, And by the wind grieved, Ghost, Come back again. View quote
Thomas Wolfe
You can't go home again. View quote
Thomas Wolfe
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. View quote
Thomas Wolfe
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. View quote
Thomas Wolfe
Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into the nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas. View quote
Thomas Wolfe
Peace fell upon her spirit. Strong comfort and assurance bathed her whole being. Life was so solid and splendid, and so good. View quote
Thomas Wolfe
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. View quote
Thomas Wolfe
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. View quote
Thomas Wolfe
To a future world,- inhabited, no doubt, by a less acute and understanding race of men, - all this may seem a trifle strange. If so, that will be because the world of the future will have forgotten what it was like to live in 1929. View quote
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)
The old church, with its sharp steeple, rotted slowly, decently, prosperously, like a good man's wife. View quote
Thomas Wolfe
Play us a tune on an unbroken spinet, and let the bells ring, let the bells ring! Play music now: play us a tune on an unbroken spinet. Do not make echoes of forgotten time, do not strike music from old broken keys, do not make ghosts with faded tinklings on the yellowed board; but play us a tune on an unbroken spinet, play lively music when the instrument was new, let us see Mozart playing in the parlor, and let us hear the sound of the ladies' voices. But more than that; waken the turmoil of forgotten streets, let us hear their sounds again unmuted, and unchanged by time, throw the light of Wednesday morning on the Third Crusade, and let us see Athens on an average day. View quote
Thomas Wolfe
They belonged to that futile, desolate, and forsaken horde who felt that all will be well with their lives, that all the power they lack themselves will be supplied, and all the anguish, fury, and unrest, the confusion and the dark damnation of man's soul can magically be healed if only they eat bran for breakfast. View quote
Thomas Wolfe
Now they saw it - its newness, its raw crudeness, and its strength - and turned their shuddering eyes away. "Give us back our well-worn husk," they said, "where we were so snug and comfortable." And then they tried word magic. "Conditions are fundamentally sound," they said - by which they meant to reassure themselves that nothing now was really changed, that things were as they always had been, and as they always would be, forever and ever, amen. But they were wrong. They did not know that you can't go home again. America had come to the end of something and to the beginning of something else. But no one knew what that something else would be and out of the change and uncertainly and the wrongness of the leaders grew fear and desperation and before long hunger stalked the streets. Through it all there was still only one certainty, though no one saw it yet. America was still America, and whatever new thing came of it would be American. View quote
Thomas Wolfe