Quotes: Thomas Wolfe
Quotes from Look Homeward, Angel
There are a lot of bad days. There are a lot of good ones.
You’ll forget. There are a lot of days.
Let it go.—Thomas Wolfe
Look Homeward, Angel
He forgave because it was necessary to forget.
—Thomas Wolfe
Look Homeward, Angel
It seemed to him that he never knew her until he remembered her years later.
—Thomas Wolfe
Look Homeward, Angel
But we are the sum of all the moments of our lives—all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape or conceal it.
—Thomas Wolfe
Look Homeward, Angel
Realizing that his first escape must come through language.
—Thomas Wolfe
Look Homeward, Angel
…fleetest when they wait, go vaguely on to their one fixed home, because the earth is full of ancient rumor and they cannot find the way. All of the gods have lost the way.
—Thomas Wolfe
Look Homeward, Angel
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.
This is a moment.—Thomas Wolfe
Look Homeward, Angel
But enduring, a victorious reality amid his shadow-haunted heart, she remained.
—Thomas Wolfe
Look Homeward Angel
But thus, he knew, could love change one.
—Thomas Wolfe
Look Homeward, Angel
They had always known each other—since they first met. They had no excuses, no questions, no replies. The world fell away from them.
—Thomas Wolfe
Look Homeward, Angel
He had the most burning of all lusts—the lust of memory, the ravenous hunger of the will which tries to waken what is dead.
—Thomas Wolfe
Look Homeward, Angel
I will remember. When I come to the place, I shall know.
—Thomas Wolfe
Look Homeward, Angel
And it was the child and dreamer that governed his belief. He belonged, perhaps, to an older and simpler race of men: he belonged with the Mythmakers.
—Thomas Wolfe
Look Homeward, Angel
Quotes from You Can’t Go Home Again
For he was a Southerner, and he knew that there was something wounded in the South. He knew that there was something twisted, dark, and full of pain which Southerners have known all their lives—something rooted in their souls beyond all contradiction, about which no one had dared to write, of which no one had ever spoken.
—Thomas Wolfe
You Can’t Go Home Again
And it all boiled down to this: Honesty, sincerity, no compromise with truth—those were the essentials of any art…
—Thomas Wolfe
You Can’t Go Home Again
I’ve got an idea that a lot of work in this world gets done by lazy people. That’s the reason they work—because they’re so lazy… You work becuase you have to drive yourself to such a fury to begin…It’s so hard to get started that once you do you’re afraid of slipping back. You’d rather do anything than go through all that agony again…Then people say you’re a glutton for work, but it isn’t so. It’s laziness—just plain, damned, simple laziness, that’s all.”
—Thomas Wolfe
You Can’t Go Home Again
Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth, and listen.
—Thomas Wolfe
You Can’t Go Home Again
You found the earth too great for your one life… But it has been this way with all men… You have faltered, you have missed the way… And now, because you have known madness and despair… We who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savored all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us—we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.
—Thomas Wolfe
You Can’t Go Home Again
…it was silly, anyhow, to feel as he did about the place. 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 such blazing accuracy, if it did not matter, and if this little town, and the immortal hills around it, was not the only home he had on earth?
—Thomas Wolfe
You Can’t Go Home Again
…and he had an instant sense of something re-found that he had always known—something far, near, strange, and so familiar—and it seemed to him that he had never left the hills, and all that had passed in the years between was like a dream.
—Thomas Wolfe
You Can’t Go Home Again
…Must the beggar on horseback forever reel?
—Thomas Wolfe
You Can’t Go Home Again
All he knew was that the years flow by like water, and that one day men come home again.
—Thomas Wolfe
You Can’t Go Home Again
Quotes from Of Time and the River
It is all so strange, so near, so far, so terrible, beautiful, and instantly familiar, that it seems to the traveler that he must have known these people forever…
—Thomas Wolfe
Of Time and the River
… for once seen, and list the moment that he sees it, it is his forever and he can never forget it. And then the slow toiling train has passed these lives and faces and is gone, and there is something in his heart he cannot say.
—Thomas Wolfe
Of Time and the River
He cannot think that he has ever lived there in the far lost hills, or ever left them.
—Thomas Wolfe
Of Time and the River