Thomas Wolfe Quotes

American writer

Thomas Clayton Wolfe (October 3, 1900 – September 15, 1938) was a major American novelist of the early twentieth century. Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels, plus many short stories, dramatic works and novellas. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing.

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Alternative Names: Thomas Clayton Wolfe • Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Jr. • Tom Wolfe

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To a future world,— inhabited, no doubt, by a less acute and understanding race of men, — all this may seem a trifle strange. If so, that will be because the world of the future will have forgotten what it was like to live in 1929.

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 inevitable fact of human existence.

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 whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him — this, seeker, is the promise of America.

When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people- not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul, as evidenced by the innumerable strident words of abuse, hatred, contempt, mistrust, and scorn that forever grate upon our ears as the manswarm passes us in the streets -- we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness.