Thomas Wolfe Quotes

1900–1938 United States

Thomas Clayton Wolfe (October 3, 1900 – September 15, 1938) was a major American novelist of the early twentieth century. Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dramatic works and novellas.

United States
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Essayists
Novelists
Playwrights

Also known as: Thomas Clayton Wolfe

Random Thomas Wolfe quote

25 quotes

His enemy was time. Or perhaps it was his friend. One never knows for sure.

You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

The old church, with its sharp steeple, rotted slowly, decently, prosperously, like a good man's wife.

Look Homeward, Angel (1929)

He who lets himself be whored by fashion will be whored by time.

You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

Go, seeker, if you will, throughout the land and you will find us burning in the night.

You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

Most of the time we think we're sick, it's all in the mind.

Look Homeward, Angel (1929)

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

One belongs to New York instantly, one belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.

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

The Web and the Rock (1939)

The exquisite smell of the south, clean but funky, like a big woman.

Look Homeward, Angel (1929)

New York blazes like a magnificent jewel in its fit setting of sea, and earth, and stars.

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.

Of Time and the River (1935)

In New York the opportunities for learning, and acquiring a culture that shall not come out of the ruins, but belong to life, are probably greater than anywhere else in the world.

Of Time and the River (1935)

The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.

The Anatomy of Loneliness (1941)

To believe that new monsters will arise as vicious as the old, to believe that the great Pandora's Box of human frailty, once opened, will never show a diminution of its ugly swarm, is to help, by just that much, to make it so forever.

You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

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.

You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

And the eternal paradox of it is that if a man is to know the triumphant labor of creation, he must for long periods resign himself to loneliness, and suffer loneliness to rob him of the health, the confidence, the belief and joy which are essential to creative work.

The Anatomy of Loneliness (1941)

And it was this that awed him — the weird combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time.

Look Homeward, Angel (1929)

Through Chance, we are each a ghost to all the others, and our only reality; through Chance, the huge hinge of the world, and a grain of dust; the stone that starts an avalanche, the pebble whose concentric circles widen across the seas.

Look Homeward, Angel (1929)

By Christmas, with fair luck, he might be eligible for service in khaki: by Spring, if God was good, all the proud privileges of trench-lice, mustard gas, spattered brains, punctured lungs, ripped guts, asphyxiation, mud and gangrene, might be his.

Look Homeward, Angel (1929)

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.

Look Homeward, Angel (1929)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Thomas Wolfe (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.