Thomas Wolfe Quotes

My life is the road, man. I need to keep moving.

Roots are nice, but a tree can’t run.

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.

There's a difference in how I feel when I'm travelling and when I'm sitting still. I've been doing it for such a long time it has become a part of my life. It gets a bit hectic depending on where I am, you know, like there's different parts of the world that's more stimulating than other parts.

It is always the way of events in this life,...no sooner have you got settled in a pleasant resting place, than a voice calls out to you to rise and move on, for the hour of repose is expired.

Restlessness is the hallmark of existence.

For something that is static, fixed, dead, there can be a way or a definite path; but not for anything that is moving and living.

People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.

Change was everywhere. People were gone, or changed, and that was almost like being gone.

And still the Void is still and'll never move - But I will be the Void, moving without having moved.

People say I'm America's worst nightmare. I say I'm the American dream.

It is a paradox that in our time of drastic rapid change, when the future is in our midst devouring the present before our eyes, we have never been less certain about what is ahead of us.

He is less likely to be mistaken who looks forward to a change in the affairs of the world than he who regards them as firm and stable.

People around the world were moving from one place to another. No one was staying.

Each moment that passes changes you...You can't even own yourself. How can you ever hope to own anyone or anything else.

Inconsistency is my very essence; it is the game I never cease to play as I turn my wheel in its ever changing circle, filled with joy as I bring the top to the bottom and the bottom to the top

We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us.

I may venture to affirm the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.

I like to talk about America. It's so mysterious.

I think that in life, being is nothing but an illusion. If we acknowledge that and accept the fact that we are in between states, that we are moving, and this movement is the nature of our lives, and we stop having aspirations for being in a definite state, we know life better and are able to enjoy it better.

I've never really been settled. I don't think I've ever known what it was like to be a person that was used to sitting still. I think it's given me the ability to detach from any situation.

Everything keeps changing. People want to label things all the time and once you label it, it changes again.

I've always been better moving than I am standing still.

You see for me, America is an idea. It is a stage for transformation. I felt when I came to Iowa City from Calcutta that suddenly I could be a new person . . . What America offers me is romanticism and hope . . . Suddenly, I found myself in a country where

I love to move like a mouse inside this puzzle for the body, balancing the wish to be lost with the need to be found.