Thomas Wolfe Quotes

53 quotes in 936 categories

• My dear, dear girl [. . .] we can't turn back the days that have gone. We can't turn life back to the hours when…
• O lost, And by the wind grieved, Ghost, Come back again.
• I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.
• Only the dead know Brooklyn.
• 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…
• There’s no sight on earth more appealing than that of a woman making dinner for someone she loves.
• 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…
• By God, I shall spend the rest of my life getting my heart back, healing and forgetting every scar you put upon me when I…
• Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America -- that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At…
• 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…
• [T]he essence of belief is doubt, the essence of reality is questioning. The essence of Time is Flow, not Fix. The essence of faith is…
• 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,…
• But why had he always felt so strongly the magnetic pull of home, why had he thought so much about it and remembered it with…
• Peace fell upon her spirit. Strong comfort and assurance bathed her whole being. Life was so solid and splendid, and so good.
• 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…
• And who shall say--whatever disenchantment follows--that we ever forget magic; or that we can ever betray, on this leaden earth, the apple-tree, the singing, and…
• The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater…
• Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.
• 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…
• There came to him an image of man’s whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all man’s life was like a tiny…

Browse Thomas Wolfe Quotes by Category