59+ Thomas Wolfe Quotes On Home, Death And Expansive

Thomas Wolfe was an American novelist from Asheville, North Carolina. He is best known for his novel Look Homeward, Angel, which was published in 1929. His other works include Of Time and the River and You Can't Go Home Again. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Thomas Wolfe on home, death, love.

Top 10 Thomas Wolfe Quotes

1. You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.
2. 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.
3. A cult is a religion with no political power.
4. The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.
8. Making the world safe for hypocrisy.
9. It seems to me that in the orbit of our world you are the North Pole, I the South--so much in balance, in agreement--and yet... the whole world lies between.
10. 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.

Thomas Wolfe Short Quotes

• There is one voyage, the first, the last, the only one.
• There’s no sight on earth more appealing than that of a woman making dinner for someone she loves.
• The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
• Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.
• Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.
• O lost, And by the wind grieved, Ghost, Come back again.
• A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.
• Only the dead know Brooklyn.
• One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
• I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.

Thomas Wolfe Quotes About Home

You can't go home again — Thomas Wolfe

Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years. The minute-winning days, like flies, buzz home to death, and every moment is a window on all time. — Thomas Wolfe

...the dark ancestral cave, the womb from which mankind emerged into the light, forever pulls one back - but...you can't go home again...you can't go...back home to the escapes of Time and Memory. You Can't Go Home Again — Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Wolfe Quotes About Death

In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying the darkness and we know no death. — Thomas Wolfe

Death the last voyage, the longest, and the best. — Thomas Wolfe

The mountains were his masters. They rimmed in life. They were the cup of reality, beyond growth, beyond struggle and death. They were his absolute unity in the midst of eternal change. — Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Wolfe Famous Quotes And Sayings

Toil on, son, and do not lose heart or hope. Let nothing you dismay. You are not utterly forsaken. I, too, am here--here in the darkness waiting, here attentive, here approving of your labor and your dream. — Thomas Wolfe

My dear, dear girl [. . .] we can't turn back the days that have gone. We can't turn life back to the hours when our lungs were sound, our blood hot, our bodies young. We are a flash of fire--a brain, a heart, a spirit. And we are three-cents-worth of lime and iron--which we cannot get back. — Thomas Wolfe

Then summer fades and passes and October comes. We'll smell smoke then, and feel an unexpected sharpness, a thrill of nervousness, swift elation, a sense of sadness and departure. — Thomas Wolfe

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened. — 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

And who shall say--whatever disenchantment follows--that we ever forget magic; or that we can ever betray, on this leaden earth, the apple-tree, the singing, and the gold? — 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

What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish. — Thomas Wolfe

Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his work and make it stick. They can only bring you the scores. — 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

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave. — 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

But why had he always felt so strongly the magnetic pull of home, why had he thought so much about it and remembered it with such blazing accuracy, if it did not matter, and if this little town, and the immortal hills around it, was not the only home he had on earth? He did not know. All that he knew was that the years flow by like water, and that one day men come home again. — Thomas Wolfe

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. — 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

By God, I shall spend the rest of my life getting my heart back, healing and forgetting every scar you put upon me when I was a child. The first move I ever made, after the cradle, was to crawl for the door, and every move I have made since has been an effort to escape. — Thomas Wolfe

Peace fell upon her spirit. Strong comfort and assurance bathed her whole being. Life was so solid and splendid, and so good. — Thomas Wolfe

The old hunger for voyages fed at his heart....To go alone...into strange cities; to meet strange people and to pass again before they could know him; to wander, like his own legend, across the earth--it seemed to him there could be no better thing than that. — Thomas Wolfe

The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read would seem to be…. The thought that other books were waiting for him tore at his heart forever. — Thomas Wolfe

Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good. — Thomas Wolfe

If a man has talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has talent and uses only half of it, he has half 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

Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up. — Thomas Wolfe

...he was like a man who stands upon a hill above the town he had left, yet does not say 'The town is near,' but turns his eyes upon the distant soaring ranges. — Thomas Wolfe

If a man has talent and can't use it, he's failed. If he uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he uses the whole of it, he has succeeded, and won a satisfaction and triumph few men ever know. — Thomas Wolfe

At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being--the reward he seeks--the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity. — Thomas Wolfe

Something has spoken to me in the night...and told me that I shall die, I know not where. Saying: "[Death is] to lose the earth you know for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth. — Thomas Wolfe

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. — Thomas Wolfe

The modern picture of the artist began to form: The poor, but free spirit, plebeian but aspiring only to be classless, to cut himself forever free from the bonds of the greedy bourgeoisie, to be whatever the fat burghers feared most, to cross the line wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way they couldn't see, to be high, live low, stay young forever -- in short, to be the bohemian. — 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. At any rate, that 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

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

It is comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don't put psychotics in high places and we've got the problem solved. — Thomas Wolfe

[T]he essence of belief is doubt, the essence of reality is questioning. The essence of Time is Flow, not Fix. The essence of faith is the knowledge that all flows and that everything must change. The growing man is Man Alive, and his "philosophy" must grow, must flow, with him. . . . the man too fixed today, unfixed tomorrow - and his body of beliefs is nothing but a series of fixations. — Thomas Wolfe

I don't know yet what I am capable of doing, but, by God, I have genius -- I know it too well to blush behind it. — Thomas Wolfe

Life Lessons by Thomas Wolfe

1. Thomas Wolfe taught that life is a journey of self-discovery, and that it is important to take risks and explore the unknown in order to live a meaningful life.
2. He also believed that it is important to be open to new experiences and to embrace change, as it can lead to personal growth and a better understanding of the world.
3. Finally, Wolfe encouraged readers to appreciate the beauty of life and to strive for greatness, no matter the obstacles in their way.