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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

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Thomas Wolfe
Age: 37 †
Born: 1900
Born: October 3
Died: 1938
Died: September 15
Dramaturge
Essayist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Writer
Asheville
North Carolina
Thomas Clayton Wolfe
Place
Lessons
Manuscripts
May
Pieces
Publish
Ever
Wants
Finest
Done
Face
Hopes
Writing
Faces
Lesson
Thing
Learn
Bitter
Everyone
Piece
Write
Absolutely
Manuscript

More quotes by Thomas Wolfe

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A young man is so strong, so mad, so certain, and so lost. He has everything and he is able to use nothing.
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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.
Thomas Wolfe
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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
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Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.
Thomas Wolfe
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...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
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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
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Making the world safe for hypocrisy.
Thomas Wolfe
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Only the dead know Brooklyn.
Thomas Wolfe
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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
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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.
Thomas Wolfe
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Peace fell upon her spirit. Strong comfort and assurance bathed her whole being. Life was so solid and splendid, and so good.
Thomas Wolfe
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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
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Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.
Thomas Wolfe
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Is this not the true romantic feeling not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.
Thomas Wolfe
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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.
Thomas Wolfe