Thomas Wolfe: Trending quotes

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Thomas Wolfe: 102 quotes33 likes

“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 book You Can't Go Home Again

Book VII, Ch. 47: Ecclesiasticus
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

“You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, … back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time -- back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book VI, Ch. 44: The Way of No Return
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

“So, then, to every man his chance—to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining, golden opportunity—to every man the right to live, to work, to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him — this, seeker, is the promise of America.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book IV, Ch. 31: The Promise of America
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

“Go, seeker, if you will, throughout the land and you will find us burning in the night.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book IV, Ch. 31: The Promise of America
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

“What Christ is saying always, what he never swerves from saying, what he says a thousand times and in a thousand different ways, but always with a central unity of belief, is this: "I am my Father’s son, and you are my brothers." And the unity that binds us all together, that makes this earth a family, and all men brothers and the sons of God, is love.”

Thomas Wolfe

The Anatomy of Loneliness (1941)

“Nacreous pearl light swam faintly about the hem of the lilac darkness; the edges of light and darkness were stitched upon the hills. Morning moved like a pearl-gray tide across the fields and up the hillflanks, flowing rapidly down into the soluble dark.”

Thomas Wolfe book Look Homeward, Angel

Source: Look Homeward, Angel (1929), p. 142

“It was like a dream of hell, when a man finds his own name staring at him from the Devil's ledger; like a dream of death, when he who comes as mourner finds himself in the coffin, or as witness to a hanging, the condemned upon the scaffold.”

Thomas Wolfe book Look Homeward, Angel

Source: Look Homeward, Angel (1929), p. 62

“When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people- not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul, as evidenced by the innumerable strident words of abuse, hatred, contempt, mistrust, and scorn that forever grate upon our ears as the manswarm passes us in the streets -- we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness.”

Thomas Wolfe

The Anatomy of Loneliness (1941)

“Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox in America--that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, this is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book I, Ch. 5: The Hidden Terror
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)

“He who lets himself be whored by fashion will be whored by time.”

Thomas Wolfe book You Can't Go Home Again

Book II, Ch. 21: Love is Not Enough
You Can't Go Home Again (1940)