Tao Te Ching
Thomas Wolfe
(Thomas Clayton Wolfe)
1900 – 1938 CE
Father of autobiographical fiction
North Carolina's most famous writer, father of innovative autobiographical fiction, novelist, playwright, and major influence on the Beat Generation writers; Wolfe lived a short but creatively influential life. His famous novel, Look Homeward, Angel included more than 200 thinly disguised references to family and friends in his hometown of Asheville, NC. Their outrage to this book basically exiled him for 8+ years but their equally negative response to his next book was caused by them not being included. William Faulkner called him the greatest talent of their generation, Jack Kerouac idolized him, Ray Bradbury was so impressed he included Wolfe as a character in one of his books, Prince of Tides author Pat Conroy credited him with sparking his writing career, and Hunter S. Thompson thanked him for his famous phrase "Fear and Loathing".
Lineages
American (USA) Poets
Eras
Western
Post-Romantic Age (1850 – 2018 CE)Great Depression (1929 – 1941 CE)
Roaring Twenties (1920 – 1929 CE)
Generations
The Lost Generation (1883 – 1900 CE)Unlisted Sources
Anatomy of Lonliness, 1941
Look Homeward, Angel
Look Homeward, Angel, 1929
Of Time and the River
You Can't Go Home Again, 1940
Quotes by Thomas Wolfe (25 quotes)
“The reason a writer writes a book is to forget and the reason a reader reads one is to remember.”
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“You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.”
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“Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.”
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“Carry the fear of death forever in your heart—for that ends all glory. Use it as a spur to ride your life across the barriers.”
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“I think the true discovery of America is before us, the true fulfillment of our spirit, of our people, of our mighty and immortal land, is yet to come; the true discovery of our own democracy is still before us... not only our living hope, but our dream to be accomplished.”
from You Can't Go Home Again, 1940
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“A billion men have since professed his way and never followed it... What Christ is saying always, what he never swerves from saying, what he says a thousand times and in a thousand different ways... is love.”
from You Can't Go Home Again, 1940
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“You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame… back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time”
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“Ah destiny… touched by that dark miracle of chance which makes new magic in a dusty world.”
from Look Homeward, Angel
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“Each of us is all the sums he has not counted: subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas.”
from Look Homeward, Angel
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“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.”
from Look Homeward, Angel
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“There came to him an image of man’s whole life upon the earth… a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable and terrifying darkness… And he knew that he would die with defiance on his lips, and that the shout of his denial would ring with the last pulsing of his heart into the maw of all-engulfing night.”
from Look Homeward, Angel
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“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.”
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“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.”
from Of Time and the River
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“He directs the destiny of the nations, but he cannot direct his own destiny with dignity or wisdom for ten consecutive minutes.”
from You Can't Go Home Again, 1940
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“Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.”
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“This is the artist, then - life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.”
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“If we are always arriving and departing, it is also true that we are eternally anchored. One's destination is never a place but rather a new way of looking at things.”
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“Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don't freeze up.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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“Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?”
from Look Homeward, Angel, 1929
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“I put the relation of a fine teacher to a student just below the relation of a mother to a son.”
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“And Christ himself, who preached the life of love, was yet as lonely as any man that ever lived.”
from Anatomy of Lonliness, 1941
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