Quotes from Tobias Wolff

And I learned that it's a bad idea to curse if you're in trouble, but a good idea to sing, if you can.

why would Caesar fear Ovid, except for knowing that neither his divinity nor all his legions could protect him from a good line of poetry.

You boys know what tropism is, it's what makes a plant grow toward the light. Everything aspires to the light. You don't have to chase down a fly to get rid of it—you just darken the room, leave a crack of light in a window, and out he goes. Works every time. We all have that instinct, that aspiration. Science can't—what was your word? dim?—science can't dim that. All science can do is turn out the false lights so the true light can get us home.

Because I did not know who I was, any image of myself, no matter how grotesque, had power over me.

He did not remember when he began to regard the heap of books on his desk with boredom and dread, or when he grew angry at writers for writing them. He did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else.

Whatever people gave you from their overflowing hearts they remembered, and expected you to remember, forever.

I was a sitting duck myself, and Arthur had a map of my nerves.

I had never seen such sorrow; it appalled me. And I was even more appalled by her attempts to overcome it, because they so plainly, pathetically failed and in failing opened up a view of the world I had only begun to suspect, where wounds did not heal, and things did not work out for the best

I had no right to see them this way.

That room—once you enter it, you never really leave. You can forget you're there, you can go on as if you hold the reins, that the course of your life, yea even its length, will reflect the force of your character and the wisdom of your judgments. And then you hit an icy patch on a turn one sunny March day and the wheel in your hands becomes a joke and you no more than a spectator to your own dreamy slide toward the verge, and then you remember where you are.

The life that produces writing can't be written about. Is is a life carried on without the knowledge even of the writer, below the mind's business and noise, in deep unlit shafts where phantom messengers struggle toward us, killing one another along the way; and when a few survivors break through to our attention they are received as blandly as waiters bringing more coffee.

Anders turns and looks at him. He wants to hear Coyle's cousin repeat what he's just said, but he knows better than to ask. The others will think he's being a jerk, ragging the kid for his grammar. But that isn't it, not at all - it's that Anders is strangely roused, elated, by those final two words, their pure unexpectedness and their music. He takes the field in a trance, repeating them to himself.

They'll die, and then they'll be dead.

Most of our desires are clichés, right? Ready to wear, one size fits all. I doubt if it's even possible to have an original desire anymore.

Memory is a dream to begin with.

He still had his tie on, a knitted tie with a flat bottom. It looked crocheted; it looked like a doily. Our biology master wore ties like that but George was the only boy you'd catch dead in one. He was both the oldest and youngest of us, the most fuddy-duddy and innocent, and I could see that his innocence extended to this question of sardonic intent. His poem, alas, was perfectly serious.

Just don't lose the magic.

O for a beakerful of the warm South!

Anders burst our laughing. He covered his mouth with both hands and said, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, then snorted helplessly through his fingers and said, Capiche - oh, God, capiche, and at that...

People with big names aren't always big people.

Youth. A once-in-a-lifetime experience.

We're never too old for dreams.

Considerations? No thanks, Howard. That's what they make cages out of.

Look the stars are out. Don't you wish you could reach out and pick them like flowers?" "I hadn't thought of it." "Life. That's the way life is to me, Howard. You keep picking things until you get the one thing that really matters. Tell me about your great love.