Thomas Wolfe Quotes

“Eugene thought of this young Jew years later with the old piercing shame, with the riving pain by which a man recalls the irrevocable moment of some cowardly or dishonorable act. For not only did he join in the persecution of the boy—he was also glad at heart because of the existence of some one weaker than himself, some one at whom the flood of ridicule might be directed. Years later it came to him that on the narrow shoulders of that Jew lay a burden he might otherwise have borne, that that overladen heart was swollen with a misery that might have been his.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe: The Complete Works

“And great Goethe, accepting the inevitable truth that human growth does not proceed in a straight line to its goal, had compared the development and progress of mankind to the reelings of a drunken beggar on horseback.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe: The Complete Works

“that the children of the coming generation may not look at you, as you can look at us, and say—‘What have you done, old men, with your inheritance? What kind of world are you leaving behind you for us young men to inherit? How can you look us in the eyes, old men, when you know that you have been unworthy of your sacred trust—that the young men of the world have been foully tricked, betrayed, dishonored by you old men’——”
― Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe: The Complete Works

“Her thin face was given a touch of shrewdness and decision by the straight line of her nose, the fine long carving of her chin. Beneath the sallow minutely pitted skin in her cheeks, and about her mouth, several frayed nerve-centres twitched from moment to moment, jarring the skin slightly without contorting or destroying the passionate calm beauty that fed her inexhaustibly from within. This face was the constant field of conflict, nearly always calm, but always reflecting the incessant struggle and victory of the enormous energy that inhabited her, over the thousand jangling devils of depletion and weariness that tried to pull her apart. There was always written upon her the epic poetry of beauty and repose out of struggle—he never ceased to feel that she had her hand around the reins of her heart, that gathered into her grasp were all the straining wires and sinews of disunion which would scatter and unjoint her members, once she let go. Literally, physically, he felt that, the great tide of valiance once flowed out of her, she would immediately go to pieces.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe: The Complete Works

“word I never knew, a door I never found.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe: The Complete Works

“Johnson remarked that a man would turn over half a library to make a single book: in the same way, a novelist may turn over half the people in a town to make a single figure in his novel.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe: The Complete Works

“As they approached the polls, glancing, like surrounded knights, for an embattled brother, the church women of the town, bent like huntresses above the straining leash, gave the word to the eager children of the Sunday schools. 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. “There he is, children. Go get him.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe: The Complete Works

“The constant meditation of both Gant and Eliza on the death of others, their morbid raking of the news for items announcing the death of some person known to them, their weird absorption with the death of some toothless hag who, galled by bedsores, at length found release after her eightieth year, while fire, famine, and slaughter in other parts of the world passed unnoticed by them, their extravagant superstition over what was local and unimportant, seeing the intervention of God in the death of a peasant, and the suspension of divine law and natural order in their own, filled him with choking fury.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe: The Complete Works

“men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know any one, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe: The Complete Works

“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.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe: The Complete Works

“The trick was to get his reason and his emotions pulling together in double harness, instead of letting them fly off in opposite directions, tearing him apart between them.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe: The Complete Works

“The sky was full of windy white rags of cloud;”
― Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe: The Complete Works

“but his white moist hands could draw from a violin music that had in it something unearthly and untaught.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Thomas Wolfe: The Complete Works