Old School Quotes

“a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“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 dim that. All science can do is turn out the false lights so the true light can get us home.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“We even talked like Hemingway characters, though in travesty, as if to deny our discipleship: That is your bed, and it is a good bed, and you must make it and you must make it well. Or: Today is the day of the meatloaf. The meatloaf is swell. It is swell but when it is gone the not-having meatloaf will be tragic and the meatloaf man will not come anymore.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“Rhyme is bullshit. Rhyme says that everything works out in the end. All harmony and order. When I see a rhyme in a poem, I know I'm being lied to. Go ahead, laugh! It's true—rhyme's a completely bankrupt device. It's just wishful thinking. Nostalgia.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“When your power comes from others, on approval, you are their slave. Never sacrifice yourselves - never! Whoever urges you to self-sacrifice is worse than a common murderer, who at least cuts your throat himself, without persuading YOU to do it.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“I am thinking of Achilles’ grief, he said. That famous, terrible, grief. Let me tell you boys something. Such grief can only be told in form. Form is everything. Without it you’ve got nothing but a stubbed-toe cry—sincere, maybe, for what that’s worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance but you do not have grief, and grievances are for petitions, not poetry.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“Without pandering to your presumed desire to identify with the hero of a story, they made you feel that what mattered to the writer had consequence for you, too.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“You felt it as a depth of ease in certain boys, their innate, affable assurance that they would not have to struggle for a place in the world; that is already reserved for them.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“Say you've just read Faulkner's 'Barn Burning'. Like the son in the story, you've sensed the faults in your father's character. Thinking about them makes you uncomfortable, left alone you'd probably close the book and move on to other thoughts. But instead you are taken in hand by a tall, brooding man with a distinguished limp who involves you and a roomful of other boys in the consideration of what it means to be a son. The loyalty that is your duty and your worth and your problem. The goodness of loyalty and its difficulties and snares, how loyalty might also become betrayal - of the self and the world outside the circle of blood.

You've never had this conversation before, not with anyone. And even as its happening you understand that just as your father's troubles with the world - emotional frailty, self-doubt, incomplete honesty - will not lead him to set it on fire, your own loyalty will never be the stuff of tragedy. You will not turn bravely and painfully from your father, as the boy in the story does, but foresake him, without regret. And as you accept that separation, it seems to happen; your father's sad, fleshy face grows vague, and you blink it away and look up to where your teachers leans against his desk, one hand in a coat pocket, the other rubbing his bum knee as he listens desolately to the clever bore behind you saying something about bird imagery.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“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.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“She'd laugh at odd times as we talked and this flustered me pleasantly and made me laugh too, as if we both understood something we couldn't say.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“I am thinking of Achilles’ grief, he said. That famous, terrible, grief. Let me tell you boys something. Such grief can only be told in form. Maybe it only really exists in form. Form is everything. Without it you’ve got nothing but a stubbed-toe cry—sincere, maybe, for what that’s worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance but you do not have grief, and grievances are for petitions, not poetry. Does that answer your question?”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“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.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“A more truthful dust jacket would say that the author, after much floundering, went to college and worked like the drones he'd once despised, kept reasonable hours, learned to be alone in a room, learned to throw stuff out, learned to keep gnawing the same bone until it cracked. It would say that the author lived more like a banker than an outlaw and that his deepest pleasures were familial—hearing his wife sing as she worked in the garden, unzipping her dress after a party; seeing his most solemn child laugh at something he said. The brief years of friendship with his father before he died, never once allowing that his son had anything to be pardoned for.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“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.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“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.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“آن زندگی را که باعث نوشتن می‌شود نمی‌توان روی کاغذ آورد. آن زندگی بی آن‌که خود نویسنده بداند به پیش می‌رود. فارغ از اشتغالات فکری و هیاهو، در گودال‌هایی عمیق و تاریک که خاطرات شبح‌وار به‌خاطر ما در آن‌جا نبرد می‌کنند، یکدیگر را از پا درمی‌آورند و در پایان که چندتاشان باقی می‌مانند در پیش چشم ما ظاهر می‌شوند، اما با همان برخورد بی‌اعتنایی مواجه می‌شوند که پیشخدمت‌ها هنگام آوردن فنجانی قهوه‌ی اضافه.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“...the folly of obsession with purity—its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering in condemnation and violence against others and oneself. For years Arch had traced this vision of the evil done through intolerance of the flawed and ambiguous, but he had not taken the lesson to heart. He had given up the good in his life because a fault ran through it.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“The stories you have to write will always make someone hate your guts. If they don't you're just producing words.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“Memory is a dream to begin with.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“They’ll die, and then they’ll be dead.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School