Quotes by Thomas Wolfe

“You can't go home again”

“I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found. And this belief, which mounts now to the catharsis of knowledge and conviction, is for me--and I think for all of us--no...”

“Something has spoken to me in the night...and told me that I shall die, I know not where. Saying: "[Death is] to lose the earth you know for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater ...”

“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 absolutel...”

“From p. 40 of Signet Edition of Thomas Wolfe's _You Can't Go Home Again_ (1940):Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth and listen.The ...”

“And his soul plunged downward, drowning in that deep pit: he felt that could never again escape from this smothering flood of pain and ugliness, from the eclipsing horror and pity of it all. And as...”

“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 mak...”

“The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.”

“He had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out--through error and through trial, through fantasy and illusion, th...”

“You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and s...”

“Come up into the hills, O my young love. Return! O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again, as first I knew you in the timeless valley, where we shall feel ourselves anew, bedded on m...”

“The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number ...”

“His life coiled back into the brown murk of the past like a twined filament of electric wire; he gave life, a pattern, and movement to these million sensations that Chance, the loss or gain of a mo...”

“Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know any one, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having see...”

“There came to him an image of mans whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all mans life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness, a...”

“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.”

“America - it is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.”

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

“Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.”

“You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.”