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Had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story he'd led his boys to consider the folly of obsession with purity - its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering condemnation and violence against others and self.

Tobias Wolff

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Tobias Wolff
Age: 79
Born: 1945
Born: June 19
Academic
Author
Autobiographer
Novelist
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Birmingham
Alabama
Tobias Jonathan Ansell Wolff
Hawthorne
Others
Consider
Sunk
Stories
Pride
Nothing
Teaching
Flowering
Self
Deep
Condemnation
Years
Boys
Obsession
Learned
Purity
Violence
Folly
Story
Roots

More quotes by Tobias Wolff

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To be a writer you need to see things as they are, and to see things as they are you need a certain basic innocence.
Tobias Wolff
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There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.
Tobias Wolff
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Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.
Tobias Wolff
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Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community.
Tobias Wolff
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A piece of writing is a dangerous thing, he said. It can change your life.
Tobias Wolff
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You felt it as a depth of ease in certain boys, their innate, affable assurance that they would not have to struggle for a place in the world that is already reserved for them.
Tobias Wolff
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Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.
Tobias Wolff
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Most of us dont live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented.
Tobias Wolff
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Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing.
Tobias Wolff
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One of the things that draws writers to writing is that they can get things right that they got wrong in real life by writing about them.
Tobias Wolff
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What writers do is they tell their own story constantly through other people's stories. They imagine other people, and those other people are carrying the burden of their struggles, their questions about themselves.
Tobias Wolff
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Reasons always came with a purpose, to give the appearance of a struggle between principle and desire. Principle had power only until you found what you had to have.
Tobias Wolff
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It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time.
Tobias Wolff
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I try to help people become the best possible editors of their own work, to help them become conscious of the things they do well, of the things they need to look at again, of the wells of material they have not even begun to dip their buckets into.
Tobias Wolff
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The human heart is a dark forest.
Tobias Wolff
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When we are green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever
Tobias Wolff
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But a lot of writers - and I'm one of them - do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it's a goad and does keep you alert and restless.
Tobias Wolff
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There’s no right way to tell all stories, only the right way to tell a particular story.
Tobias Wolff
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Want! You must want something. What do you want?
Tobias Wolff
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I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels.
Tobias Wolff