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 all of us--not only our own hope, but America's everlasting, living dream.

— Thomas Wolfe

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 somehow to use the whole of it he has gloriously succeeded and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know.

— Thomas Wolfe

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 satisfaction and triumph few men ever know.

— Thomas Wolfe

In Sleep, we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying the darkness, and we know no death.

— Thomas Wolfe

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

— Thomas Wolfe

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

— Thomas Wolfe

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 a steel and tunneled rock, slashed savagely with light, and roaring, fighting a constant ceaseless warfare of men and of machinery; and yet it was so sweetly and so delicately pulsed, as full of warmth, of passion, and of love, as it was full of hate.

— Thomas Wolfe

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

— Thomas Wolfe

Lost. He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know anyone, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never.

— Thomas Wolfe

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

— Thomas Wolfe