You can’t go home again

The attitude is we live and let live. This is actually an amazing change in values in a rather short time and it’s an example of freedom from religion.

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 exile, to...

Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good.

Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later…that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew...

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...

And so to every man his chance, To every man regardless of his birth right, his shining golden opportunity; to every man the right to live, to work and to become whatever his vision and...

There came to him an image of man’s whole life upon the earth. It seemed to him that all man’s life was like a tiny spurt of flame that blazed out briefly in an illimitable...

If a man has a talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns...

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...

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...

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...

Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.

Fields are won by those who believe in the winning.

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and...

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...

If a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested

There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.

A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.

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

A sect, incidentally, is a religion with no political power.

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

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...

You Can?t Go Home Again.

This is the artist, then, life’s hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty’s miser, glory’s slave.

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.

At the outset, at least, all three groups had something else to recommend them, as well: They were headquartered 3,000 miles away from the East Side of Manhattan.

It was a cruel city, but it was a lovely one; a savage city, yet it had such tenderness; a bitter, harsh, and violent catacomb of stone an steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with...

The surest cure for vanity is loneliness

There are some people who have the quality of richness and joy in them and they communicate it to everything they touch. It is first of all a physical quality; then it is a quality...

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

If a man has talent and can’t use it, he’s failed. If he uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he uses the whole of it, he has succeeded, and won a...

The ripe, the golden month has come again, and in Virginia the chinkapins are falling. Frost sharps the middle music of the seasons, and all things living on the earth turn home again… the fields...

Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.

Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.

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...

A young man is so strong, so mad, so certain, and so lost. He has everything and he is able to use nothing.

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...

We are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1/30th of a second ago. We think we’re in the present, but we aren’t. The present we know is only a...

Death the last voyage, the longest, and the best.

From p. 40 of Signet Edition of Thomas Wolfe’s _You Can’t Go Home Again_ (1940):Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth and listen.The...

It is very comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all we have to do is make sure we don’t put psychotics in high places and we’ve...

Love is the ultimate expression of the will to live.

Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America – that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement

The modern picture of the artist began to form: The poor, but free spirit, plebeian but aspiring only to be classless, to cut himself forever free from the bonds of the greedy bourgeoisie, to be...

Come up into the hills, O my young love. Return! O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again, as first I knew you in the timeless valley, where we shall feel ourselves...

What is it that makes a man willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle, such as a Redstone, Atlas, Titan or Saturn rocket, and wait for someone to light the fuse?

Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.

You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments, or publicity.

He had learned some of the things that every man must find out for himself, and he had found out about them as one has to find out–through error and through trial, through fantasy and...