Top 100 Thomas Wolfe Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.”

— Thomas Wolfe

2. “You can’t go home again.”

— Thomas Wolfe

3. “Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.”

— Thomas Wolfe

Featured in: Romance Quotes

4. “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

5. “You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.”

— Thomas Wolfe

6. “Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.”

— Thomas Wolfe

7. “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.”

— Thomas Wolfe

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.”

— Thomas Wolfe

12. “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

13. “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.”

— Thomas Wolfe

14. “Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.”

— Thomas Wolfe

15. “O lost, And by the wind grieved, Ghost, Come back again.”

— Thomas Wolfe

16. “He saw now that you can’t go home again – not ever. There was no road back.”

— Thomas Wolfe

17. “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

18. “Peace fell upon her spirit. Strong comfort and assurance bathed her whole being. Life was so solid and splendid, and so good.”

— Thomas Wolfe

19. “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

20. “There is one voyage, the first, the last, the only one.”

— Thomas Wolfe

21. “But we are the sum of all the moments of our lives – all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape or conceal it. If the writer has used the clay of life to make his book, he has only used what all men must, what none can keep from using. Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose.”

— Thomas Wolfe

22. “We are the sum of all the moments in our lives – all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape it or conceal it.”

— Thomas Wolfe

23. “For he had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out – through error and through trial, through fantasy and illusion, through falsehood and his own damn foolishness, through being mistaken and wrong and an idiot and egotistical and aspiring and hopeful and believing and confused.”

— Thomas Wolfe

24. “Only the dead know Brooklyn.”

— Thomas Wolfe

25. “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

26. “Fiction is not fact, but fiction is fact selected and understood, fiction is fact arranged and charged with purpose.”

— Thomas Wolfe

27. “The huge, dark wall of loneliness is around him now. It encloses and presses in upon him, and he cannot escape. And the cancerous plant of memory is feeding at his entrails, recalling hundreds of forgotten faces and ten thousand vanished days, until all life seems as strange and insubstantial as a dream.”

— Thomas Wolfe

28. “Making the world safe for hypocrisy.”

— Thomas Wolfe

29. “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

30. “I am, he thought, a part of all that I have touched and that has touched me, which, having for me no existence save that which I gave to it, became other than itself by being mixed with what I then was, and is now still otherwise, having fused with what I now am, which is itself a cumulation of what I have been becoming. Why here? Why there? Why now? Why then?”

— Thomas Wolfe

31. “Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?”

— Thomas Wolfe

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “And he knew that he would never come again, and that lost magic would not come again. Lost now was all of it – the street, the heat, King’s Highway, and Tom the Piper’s son, all mixed in with the vast and drowsy murmur of the Fair, and with the sense of absence in the afternoon, and the house that waited, and the child that dreamed.”

— Thomas Wolfe

36. “Lost. He understood that 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

37. “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

38. “Where shall the weary rest? When shall the lonely of heart come home? What doors are open for the wanderer? And which of us shall find his father, know his face, and in what place, and in what time, and in what land? Where? Where the weary of heart can abide for ever, where the weary of wandering can find peace, where the tumult, the fever, and the fret shall be for ever stilled.”

— Thomas Wolfe

39. “Finally, only thirty or forty million years before, our earliest ancestors had crawled out of the primeval slime; and then, no doubt, finding the change unpleasant, crawled back in again.”

— Thomas Wolfe

40. “Could I make tongue say more than tongue could utter! Could I make brain grasp more than brain could think! Could I weave into immortal denseness some small brede of words, pluck out of sunken depths the roots of living, some hundred thousand magic words that were as great as all my hunger, and hurl the sum of all my living out upon three hundred pages – then death could take my life, for I had lived it ere he took it: I had slain hunger, beaten death!”

— Thomas Wolfe

41. “And she did not weep for herself, but for him: the hour after his birth she had looked in his dark eyes and had seen something that would brood there eternally, she knew, unfathomable wells of remote and intangible loneliness: she knew that in her dark and sorrowful womb a stranger had come to life, fed by the lost communications of eternity, his own ghost, haunter of his own house, lonely to himself and to the world. O lost.”

— Thomas Wolfe

42. “Out of the nameless and unfathomed weavings of billion-footed life, out of the dark abyss of time and duty, blind chance had brought these two together on a ship, and their first meeting had been upon the timeless and immortal seas that beat forever at the shores of the old earth.”

— Thomas Wolfe

43. “They had a moment of cohesion, a moment of tragic affection and union, which drew them together like small jets of flame against all the senseless nihilism of life.”

— Thomas Wolfe

44. “The traveller gets out, walks up and down the platform, sees the vast slow flare and steaming of the mighty engine, rushes into the station, and looks into the faces of all the people passing with the same sense of instant familiarity, greeting, and farewell, – that lonely, strange, and poignantly wordless feeling that Americans know so well.”

— Thomas Wolfe

45. “I had not yet learned that one cannot really be superior without humility and tolerance and human understanding. I did not yet know that in order to belong to a rare and higher breed one must first develop the true power and talent of selfless immolation.”

— Thomas Wolfe

46. “There is no happy land. There is no end to hunger.”

— Thomas Wolfe

47. “And this haunting and lonely memory is due probably to the combination of two things: the ghastly imitation of swarming life and metropolitan gaiety in the scene, and the almost total absence of life itself.”

— Thomas Wolfe

48. “But it was many years before he could understand that that sensitive and feminine person, bound to him by the secret and terrible bonds of his own dishonor, had in him nothing perverse, nothing unnatural, nothing degenerate. He was as much like a woman as a man. That was all. There is no place among the Boy Scouts for the androgyne – it must go to Parnassus.”

— Thomas Wolfe

49. “After that, we had no.”

— Thomas Wolfe

50. “Outside, on Park Avenue, the people had begun to move along the sidewalks once more, the streets of the city began to fill and thicken. Upon the table by her bed the little clock ticked eagerly it’s pulse of time as if it hurried toward some imagined joy, and a clock struck slowly in the house with a measured, solemn chime. The morning sun steeped each object in her room with causal light, and in her heard she said, “It is now”.”

— Thomas Wolfe