Thomas Wolfe

“You can't go home again.”

“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.”

“All things on earth point home.”

“A stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.”

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

“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.”

“Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going.”

“The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.”

“Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America—that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.”

“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, dear brother, deny it all along the way.”

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

“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.”

“I think the true discovery of America is before us.”

“The great writer is the simplifier.”

“But why had he always felt so strongly the magnetic pull of the earth, the feel of it beneath his feet, the smell of its seasons?”