A young man is so strong, so mad, so certain, and so lost. He has everything and he is able to use nothing.
--Thomas Wolfe
All things on earth point home in old October; sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.
--Thomas Wolfe
America... It is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.
--Thomas Wolfe
And the eternal paradox of it is that if a man is to know the triumphant labor of creation, he must for long periods resign himself to loneliness.
--Thomas Wolfe
Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.
--Thomas Wolfe
Death the last voyage, the longest, and the best.
--Thomas Wolfe
He who lets himself be whored by fashion will be whored by time.
--Thomas Wolfe
His enemy was time. Or perhaps it was his friend. One never knows for sure.
--Thomas Wolfe
I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found. And this belief, which mounts now to the catharsis of knowledge and conviction, is for me- and I think for all of us- not only our own hope, but America's everlasting, living dream.
--Thomas Wolfe
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.
--Thomas Wolfe
I'm sick of praise. I want money.
--Thomas Wolfe
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.
--Thomas Wolfe
Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.
--Thomas Wolfe
Loneliness... is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.
--Thomas Wolfe
Most of the time we think we're sick, it's all in the mind.
--Thomas Wolfe
Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America- that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.
--Thomas Wolfe
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
--Thomas Wolfe
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.
--Thomas Wolfe
There are some people who have the quality of richness and joy in them and they communicate it to everything they touch. It is first of all a physical quality, then it is a quality of the spirit.
--Thomas Wolfe
There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.
--Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Wolfe was wrong- you can go home again. For example, if you forget to wear pants to work.
--John Alejandro King (The Covert Comic)
To believe that new monsters will arise as vicious as the old, to believe that the great Pandora's Box of human frailty, once opened, will never show a diminution of its ugly swarm, is to help, by just that much, to make it so forever.
--Thomas Wolfe
Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
--Thomas Wolfe
You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.
--Thomas Wolfe
Found 24 occurence(s) in 52,783 quotation(s).