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Age
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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 has forsaken.
-Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River
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Architecture
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Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird.
-Thomas Wolfe
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Art
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This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.
-Thomas Wolfe
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The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.
-Thomas Wolfe
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Artist, The
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At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being--the reward he seeks--the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.
-Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River, 1935
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City Life, Cities
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One belongs to New York instantly. One belongs to it as much in five minutes as in five years.
-Thomas Wolfe
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Cooking, Culinary
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There is no spectacle on earth more appealing than that of a beautiful woman in the act of cooking dinner for someone she loves.
-Thomas Wolfe
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Criticism
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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 the scores.
-Thomas Wolfe
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Culture
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Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.
-Thomas Wolfe
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Death
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Death the last voyage, the longest, and the best.
-Thomas Wolfe
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Home
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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.
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks07/0700231.txt
-Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again, 1947
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Leadership
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It is 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 got the problem solved.
-Thomas Wolfe
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Liberalism
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A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested.
-Thomas Wolfe
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Life
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Is this not the true romantic feeling; not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you.
-Thomas Wolfe
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Loneliness
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The surest cure for vanity is loneliness.
-Thomas Wolfe
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Military, the
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Making the world safe for hypocrisy.
-Thomas Wolfe
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Reading
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The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
-Thomas Wolfe
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Religion
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A cult is a religion with no political power.
-Thomas Wolfe
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Spirituality
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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 of the spirit.
-Thomas Wolfe
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Success & Failure
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If a man has talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has talent and uses only half of it, he has half 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
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Time
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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 movie of the past.
-Thomas Wolfe
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Books by and about Thomas Wolfe