Quotes from Thomas Wolfe

Then summer fades and passes, and October comes. Will smell smoke then, and feel an unsuspected sharpness, a thrill of nervous, swift elation, a sense of sadness and departure.

Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.

It'd take a guy a lifetime to know Brooklyn t'roo and t'roo. An' even den, yuh wouldn't know it all. Only the dead know Brooklyn t'roo an' t'roo.

I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found.

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.

I think the enemy is here before us.... I think the enemy is simple selfishness and compulsive greed.... I think he stole our earth from us, destroyed our wealth, and ravaged and despoiled our land.

Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America — that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.

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

Most of the time we think we're sick, it's all in the mind.

There is no sight on earth more appealing than the sight of a woman making dinner for someone she loves.

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

A stone, a leaf, an unfound door.

A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.

Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.

Making the world safe for hypocrisy.

Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America -- that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.

We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we're in the present, but we aren't. The present we know is only a movie of the past.

Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don't freeze up.

I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.

There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.

You can't go home again

Man is born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must deny it all along the way.

Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into the nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.