Top 100 Thomas Wolfe Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “We do not want to be told what we know. We do not want to call things by their names, although we’re willing to call one another bad ones. We call meanness nobility and hatred honor. The way to make yourself a hero is to make me out a scoundrel. You won’t admit that either, but it’s true.”

— Thomas Wolfe

52. “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

53. “They clung together in that bright moment of wonder, there on the magic island, where the world was quiet, believing all they said. 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

54. “The great shapes of the hills, embrowned and glowing with the molten hues of autumn, are all about him: the towering summits, wild and lonely, full of joy and strangeness and their haunting premonitions of oncoming winter soar above him, the gulches, gorges, gaps, and wild ravines, fall sheer and suddenly away with a dizzy terrifying steepness, and all the time the great train toils slowly down from the mountain summits with the sinuous turnings of an enormous snake.”

— Thomas Wolfe

55. “Among other things Jonestown was an example of a definition well known to sociologists of religion: a cult is a religion with no political power.”

— Thomas Wolfe

56. “She was buried in his flesh. She throbbed in the beat of his pulses. She was wine in his blood, a music in his heart.”

— Thomas Wolfe

57. “There’s no sight on earth more appealing than that of a woman making dinner for someone she loves.”

— Thomas Wolfe

58. “Why is it that we are always strangers in this world, and never come to know one another, and are full of fear and shame and hate and falseness, when what we want is love? Why is it? Why? Why? Why?”

— Thomas Wolfe

59. “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

60. “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

61. “His enemy was time. Or perhaps it was his friend. One never knows for sure.”

— Thomas Wolfe

62. “Most of the time we think we’re sick, it’s all in the mind.”

— Thomas Wolfe

63. “He was twenty eight years old now, and wise enough to know that there are sometimes reasons of which the reason knows nothing, and that the fictional pattern of one’s life, formed and set by years of living, is not to be discarded quite as easily as one may throw away a battered hat or worn-out shoe.”

— Thomas Wolfe

64. “Was it in woman’s nature to be content with all that a man could give her, and not forever want what was not his to give?”

— Thomas Wolfe

65. “The seed of our destruction will blossom in the desert, the alexin of our cure grows by a mountain rock, and our lives are haunted by a Georgia slattern, because a London cutpurse went unhung. 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

66. “Through Chance, we are each a ghost to all the others, and our only reality; through Chance, the huge hinge of the world, and a grain of dust; the stone that starts an avalanche, the pebble whose concentric circles widen across the seas.”

— Thomas Wolfe

67. “But they had their Christmas, beginning thus with parental advice and continuing through all the acts of contrition, love, and decorum. They put on, over their savage lives, the raiment of society, going diligently through the forms and conventions, and thinking, “Now, we are like all other families”; but they were timid and shy and stuff, like rustics dressed in evening clothes.”

— Thomas Wolfe

68. “A destiny that leads the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylvania, and thence into the hills that shut in Altamont over the proud coral cry of the cock, and the soft stone smile of an angel, is touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.”

— Thomas Wolfe

69. “Spring lay strewn lightly like a fragrant gauzy scarf upon the earth; the night was a cool bowl of lilac darkness, filled with fresh orchard scents.”

— Thomas Wolfe

70. “He was the complete male in miniature, the tiny acorn from which the mighty oak must grow, the heir of all ages, the inheritor of unfulfilled renown, the child of progress, the darling of the budding Golden Age, and, what’s more, Fortune and her Fairies, not content with well-nigh smothering him with their blessings of time and family, saved him up carefully until Progress was rotten-ripe with Glory.”

— Thomas Wolfe

71. “The wine of the grape had never stained her mouth, but the wine of poetry was inextinguishable mixed with her blood, entombed in her flesh.”

— Thomas Wolfe

72. “Eliza was better tuned to cosmic vibrations. With a full, if inexact, sense of what portended, she gave to Luck’s Lad the title of Eugene, a name which, beautifully, means “wellborn,” but which, as anyone will be able to testify, does not mean, has never meant, “well-bred.”

— Thomas Wolfe

73. “In a moment of vision, he saw that, for him, here was the last of the heroes, the last of those giants to whom we give the faith of our youth, believing like children that the riddle of our lives may be solved by their quiet judgment.”

— Thomas Wolfe

74. “The pallid light drowned out the stars, it lay like silence on the earth, it dropped through the leafy web of the young maples, printing the earth with swarming moths of elvish light.”

— Thomas Wolfe

75. “The great, the unspeakable crime against life is not that we have lived mistakenly or badly, but that we have lived cautiously and half-heartedly, and without belief.”

— Thomas Wolfe

76. “At times, his devouring, unsated brain seemed to be beyond his governance: it was a frightful bird whose beak was in his heart, whose talons tore unceasingly at his bowels. And this unsleeping demon wheeled, plunged, revolved about an object, returning suddenly, after it had flown away, with victorious malice, leaving stripped, mean, and common all that he had clothed with wonder.”

— Thomas Wolfe

77. “It was the beginning of that dark time of blood, and crime, and terror which the years of prohibition brought and which was to leave its hideous mutilation not only upon the soul and conscience of the nation, but upon the lives of millions of people – particularly the young everywhere. At.”

— Thomas Wolfe

78. “He was a stranger, and as he sought through the house, he was always aprowl to find some entrance into life, some secret undiscovered door – a stone, a leaf, – that might admit him into light and fellowship.”

— Thomas Wolfe

79. “To hell with them all. Don’t let them worry you. Get all that you can. Don’t give a damn for anything. Nothing gives a damn for you. To hell with it all! To hell with it! There are a lot of bad days. There are a lot of good ones. You’ll forget. There are a lot of days.”

— Thomas Wolfe

80. “There’s no place like Henderson,” said he, with complacent and annoying fidelity, referring to that haven of enervation, red clay, ignorance, slander, and superstition, in whose effluent rays he had been tested.”

— Thomas Wolfe

81. “Then, then, will fury leave us, he will cease from those red channels of our life he has so often run, another sort of worm will work at that great vine, whereat he fed. Then, then, indeed, he must give over, fold his camp, retreat; there is no place for madness in a dead man’s brain, no place for hunger in a dead man’s flesh, and in a dead man’s heart there is a place for no desire. At.”

— Thomas Wolfe

82. “Lifted, by his fantasy, into a high interior world, he scored off briefly and entirely all the grimy smudges of life: he existed nobly in a heroic world with lovely and virtuous creatures.”

— Thomas Wolfe

83. “She seized his hand almost gratefully and laid her white face, still twisted with her grief, against his shoulder. It was the gesture of a child: a gesture that asked for love, pity, and tenderness. It tore up great roots in him, bloodily.”

— Thomas Wolfe

84. “All serious work in fiction is autobiographical.”

— Thomas Wolfe

85. “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.”

— Thomas Wolfe

86. “They were like men in a zoo; he gazed at them, looking for all the little particular markings of the town, the fine mapping upon their limbs and faces of their own little cosmos.”

— Thomas Wolfe

87. “For it is the union of the ordinary and the miraculous that makes wonder.”

— Thomas Wolfe

88. “He had come down to the empty house exultantly, tasting its delicious silence, the cool mustiness of indoors, and a solitary afternoon with great calf volumes.”

— Thomas Wolfe

89. “And so incessant, it seemed to him later, had been this tyranny of strength, that in his young wild twenties when his great boneframe was powerfully fleshed at last, and he heard about him the loud voices, the violent assertion, the empty threat, memory would waken in him a maniacal anger, and he would hurl the insolent intruding swaggerer from his path, thrust back the hostler, glare insanely into fearful surprised faces and curse them.”

— Thomas Wolfe

90. “The moonlight fell upon the earth like a magic unearthly dawn. It wiped away all rawness, it hid all sores. It gave all common and familiar things – the sagging drift of the barn, the raw shed of the creamery, the rich curve of the lawyer’s crabapple trees – a uniform bloom of wonder.”

— Thomas Wolfe

91. “But this freedom, this isolation in print, this dreaming and unlimited time of fantasy, was not to last unbroken.”

— Thomas Wolfe

92. “He entombed himself in the flesh of a thousand fictional heroes, giving his favorites extension in life beyond their books, carrying their banners into the gray places of actuality, seeing himself now as the militant young clergyman, arrayed, in his war on slum conditions, against all the moneyed hostility of his fashionable church, aided in his hour of greatest travail by the lovely daughter of the millionaire tenement owner, and winning finally a victory for God, the poor, and himself.”

— Thomas Wolfe

93. “And as he stood there with Margaret quietly by his side the old and tragic light of fading day shone faintly on their faces, and all at once it seemed to him that they were fixed there like a prophecy with the hills and river all around them, and that there was something lost, intolerable, foretold and come to pass, something like old time and destiny – some magic that he could not say.”

— Thomas Wolfe

94. “She was a voice that god seeks. She was the reed of demonic ecstasy. She was possessed. She knew not how but she knew the moment of her possession. The singing tongues of all the world were wakened into life again under the incantation of her voice. She was inhabited. She was spent.”

— Thomas Wolfe

95. “Our senses have been fed by our terrific land; our blood has learned to run to the imperial pulse of America which, leaving, we can never lose and never forget.”

— Thomas Wolfe

96. “There was a beautiful thoroughness about his wakened anger – it never made inquiries till later.”

— Thomas Wolfe

97. “But he became passionately bored with them, plunged into a miasmic swamp of weariness and horror, after a time, because of the dullness and ugliness of their lives, their minds, their amusements. Dull people filled him with terror: he was never so much frightened by tedium in his own life as in the lives of others...”

— Thomas Wolfe

98. “Then he walked off with fatigued relief into time toward the twentieth century, feeling gratefully the ghost-kiss of absent weight upon his now free but still leaning right shoulder.”

— Thomas Wolfe

99. “He groped for the doorless land of faery, that illimitable haunted country that opened somewhere below a leaf or a stone.”

— Thomas Wolfe

100. “Eugene watched the sun wane and redden on a rocky river, and on the painted rocks of Tennessee gorges: the enchanted river wound into his child’s mind forever.”

— Thomas Wolfe