Quotes from Tobias Wolff

You just go from day to day and before you know it fifty years are up.

Because they were alone. In fact everyone was alone all the time, but when you got sick you knew it, and that was a lot of what suffering was-knowing.

It was good to be alone. Really alone, without other people around you to let you imagine that your life had mingled with theirs. But that never was true. Even together, people were as solitary as cows in a field chewing their own cud.

Because she had been involved with other people , and other people muddied the water.

The Outlaws generally write as well as the bankers, though more briefly. Some writers flourish like opportunistic weeds by hiding among the citizens, others by toughing it out in some sort of desert or another.

There is only one thing you have to know about the future: everything gets worse.

And Marty understood that there was never going to be anyone to tell her these things. She had no idea why this should be so; it was just something she knew.

People left one another, and got left, every day. It was a terrible thing. But it happened and people survived, as they survived worse things.

Someday Miller is going to die. He knows that and he prides himself on knowing it when everyone else only pretends to, secretly believing that they will live forever.....A simple truth . His mother is also going to die . Just like him. And there is no telling when.

But if they could live without each other, and do better without each other, then this could not be true and must never have been true. They did not need each other. There was no particular reason for them to be together. Then what was it all about? They were dragging each other down like two people who couldn't swim. If they were lucky, they might keep at it long enough to grow old in the same house.

The truth was that when you got married you had to give up one thing after another. It never ended. You had to give up your life—the special one that you were meant to have—and lead some middle kind of life that went where neither of you had ever thought of going, or wanted to go. And you never knew what was happening. You gave up your life and didn't even know it.

The stories you have to write will always make someone hate your guts. If they don't you're just producing words.

Reasons always came with a purpose, to give the appearance of a struggle between principle and desire. But there'd been no struggle. Principle had power only until you found what you had to have.

bubbles rose over the Champagne Orchestra and Lawrence Welk came onstage salaaming in every direction, crying out declarations of humility in his unctuous, brain-scalding Swedish kazoo of a voice.

Real maturity is the ability to imagine the humanity of every person as fully as you believe in your own humanity.

Of course it's why you want to become a writer - because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.

I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.

Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.

We are made to persist. That's how we find out who we are.

We are made to persist. that's how we find out who we are.

Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it.

A piece of writing is a dangerous thing," he said. "It can change your life.

a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.