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Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Wolfe Quotes

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Famous Thomas Wolfe Quotes

“Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America -- that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began.”

HomeAmericaYoungPurposeCertainFeltMovementStrangeTrainRateFixedParadoxAssuredHauntingHomelessness
Book:You Can't Go Home Again
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“[T]he essence of belief is doubt, the essence of reality is questioning. The essence of Time is Flow, not Fix. The essence of faith is the knowledge that all flows and that everything must change. The growing man is Man Alive, and his "philosophy" must grow, must flow, with him. . . . the man too fixed today, unfixed tomorrow - and his body of beliefs is nothing but a series of fixations.”

MenPhilosophyBodyRealityTodayBeliefGrowsDoubtAliveGrowingTomorrowFlowEssenceSeriesFixedQuestioningFixation
Author:Thomas Wolfe
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“The human mind is a fearful instrument of adaptation, and in nothing is this more clearly shown than in its mysterious powers of resilience, self-protection, and self-healing. Unless an event completely shatters the order of one's life, the mind, if it has youth and health and time enough, accepts the inevitable and gets itself ready for the next happening like a grimly dutiful American tourist who, on arriving at a new town, looks around him, takes his bearings, and says, "Well, where do I go from here?”

IfsMindHumansWellsLooksSelfEnoughOrderNextHealingAcceptingEventsYouthReadyHappeningsTownsInstrumentsProtectionResilienceMysteriousInevitableHuman MindFearfulAdaptationTouristsArrivingSelf HealingSelf Protection
Book:You Can't Go Home Again
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“But why had he always felt so strongly the magnetic pull of home, why had he thought so much about it and remembered it with such blazing accuracy, if it did not matter, and if this little town, and the immortal hills around it, was not the only home he had on earth? He did not know. All that he knew was that the years flow by like water, and that one day men come home again.”

IfsKnowsMenYearsLittlesMatterHomeEarthFeltWaterOne DayFlowTownsHillsRememberedImmortalComing HomeAccuracyMagneticBlazingLittle Towns
Book:You Can't Go Home Again
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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.”

KnowsHeartBookSeemsWaitingNumbersForeverGreaterMadImmense
Book:Of Time and the River: A Legend of Man's Hunger in His Youth
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“All things belonging to the earth will never change-the leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again, the trees whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and the dust of lovers long since buried in the earth-all things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth-these things will always be the same, for they come up from the earth that never changes, they go back into the earth that lasts forever. Only the earth endures, but it endures forever.”

LongEarthLastsDarkSleepForeverTreeCryWindFlowerArmsLoversAll ThingsSeasonsEndureCome UpDustBelongingBuriedLeafsBladesNever ChangeClashProceedingLapses
Book:You Can't Go Home Again
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“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 and terrifying darkness, and that all man’s grandeur, tragic dignity, his heroic glory, came from the brevity and smallness of this flame. He knew his life was little and would be extinguished, and that only darkness was immense and everlasting. 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.”

MenHeartLittlesWholeWould BeEarthLastsNightDiesDarknessGloryDignityLipsWhole LifeTinyRingsDenialFlamesTragicHeroicImmenseEverlastingGrandeurDefianceBrevitySmallnessEngulfing
Author:Thomas Wolfe
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