Quotes from Thomas Wolfe

What was it, token of all our wordless and incongruent hunger that one saw here, that has never been expressed, that was so imminent, so exasperating, so impalpably near, as if the opiate of finality we had sought for our exacerbated nerves, the complete nurture we needed to stop the jaws of Cerberus was here almost within our grasp, an inch away from hope, a hand's breadth off from certainty.

Dressed all in white, and clutching firmly in their small hands the tiny stems of American flags, the pigmies, monstrous as only children can be when they become the witless mouths of slogans and crusades, charged hungrily, uttering their shrill cries, upon their Gulliver.

For it is so with time and memory: the seed of our deepest feeling is buried under the rush of a momentary and violent one, there is in all feeling a quality of deception and evasion, and the meanings of the spirit become evident only in the light of a dispassionate distance

naked and alone we came into exile

But these cries proceeded not so much from a conviction of wounded justice and deceived innocence as from their opposites. It was the sublime, ironic, and irrevocable justice of what had happened to them, and their knowledge that they alone had been responsible for it, that maddened them. From this arose their sense of outrage and their cries of vengeance.

But they had their Christmas, beginning thus with parental advice and continuing through all the acts of contrition, love, and decorum. They put on, over their savage lives, the raiment of society, going diligently through the forms and conventions, and thinking, Now, we are like all other families; but they were timid and shy and stuff, like rustics dressed in evening clothes.

Pay no attention to them, ladies, I beg of you, said Gant scathingly. They are the lowest of the low, the whiskey-besotted dregs of humanity, who deserve to bear not even the name of men, so far have they retrograded backwards. With a flourishing sweep of his slouch hat he departed into the warehouse. By God! said Ambrose Nethersole approvingly. It takes W. O. to tie a knot in the tail of the English language. It always did.

In a moment of vision, he saw that, for him, here was the last of the heroes, the last of those giants to whom we give the faith of our youth, believing like children that the riddle of our lives may be solved by their quiet judgment.

A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.

My dear, dear girl, he said gently as she tried to speak, we can't turn back the days that have gone. We can't turn life back to the hours when our lungs were sound, our blood hot, our bodies young. We are a flash of fire--a brain, a heart, a spirit. And we are three cents worth of lime and iron--which we cannot get back.

Then he walked off with fatigued relief into time toward the twentieth century, feeling gratefully the ghost-kiss of absent weight upon his now free but still leaning right shoulder.

She seized his hand almost gratefully and laid her white face, still twisted with her grief, against his shoulder. It was the gesture of a child: a gesture that asked for love, pity, and tenderness. It tore up great roots in him, bloodily.

And so incessant, it seemed to him later, had been this tyranny of strength, that in his young wild twenties when his great boneframe was powerfully fleshed at last, and he heard about him the loud voices, the violent assertion, the empty threat, memory would waken in him a maniacal anger, and he would hurl the insolent intruding swaggerer from his path, thrust back the hostler, glare insanely into fearful surprised faces and curse them.

Each of them lived in a fear of discovery; each of them who was able built up his own defenses of swagger, pretense, and loud assertion—the great masculine flower of gentleness, courage, and honor died in a foul tangle. The great clan of go-getter was emergent in young boys—big in voice, violent in threat, withered and pale at heart—the "He-men" were on the rails.

Is not this the true romantic feeling - not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.

Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.

If a man has a talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole of it, he has gloriously succeeded, and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

A young man is so strong, so mad, so certain, and so lost. He has everything and he is able to use nothing.

...he was like a man who stands upon a hill above the town he had left, yet does not say 'The town is near,' but turns his eyes upon the distant soaring ranges.

In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying the darkness and we know no death.

If a man has talent and can't use it, he's failed. If he uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he uses the whole of it, he has succeeded, and won a satisfaction and triumph few men ever know.

The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.

If a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested