Tobias Wolff Quotes

When you're young, you envision happiness in such an idealized way.

Youth enters the world with very happy prejudices in her own favor. She imagines herself not only certain of accomplishing every adventure, but of obtaining those rewards which the accomplishment may deserve. She is not easily persuaded to believe that the force of merit can be resisted by obstinacy and avarice, or its luster darkened by envy and malignity.

We're all idealistic when young.

We have believing in this innocent feeling of nothing will ever happen to us, because all catastrophes always broad and happening to anyone else.

Youth goes caparisoned in immortality.

How men envy and often hate these warm clocks, these wives, who know they will live forever. So what do we do? We men turn terribly mean, because we can't hold to the world or ourselves or anything. We are blind to continuity, all breaks down, falls, melts, stops, rots, or runs away. So, since we cannot shape Time, where does that leave men? Sleepless. Staring.

Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream, And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by? ---"On death

It is impossible to be a cynic if you live a good deal with young people. Fundamentally, every young person has a feeling that the future is going to hold something of value.

There was this kind of wackiness that was really embraced and put on a pedestal. It was before the millennium. We were envisioning a future that was mostly idealistic. I think that came crashing down a little bit in 9/11, or a lot. There is something about Portland that does seem to still exist in this total idealistic world and total idealistic mind frame, and I think that's what Dream of the '90s is talking about.

Often the biggest dreamers get hurt the most. They were pure in their insanity and in their isolation. They were living the dream amongst themselves and didn’t realize it. It’s when they invited the public inside their world that everything went wrong.

Where are Shakespeare's imagination, Bacon's learning, Galileo's dream? Where is the sweet fancy of Sidney, the airy spirit of Fletcher, and Milton's thought severe? Methinks such things should not die and dissipate, when a hair can live for centuries, and a brick of Egypt will last three thousand years. I am content to believe that the mind of man survives, somehow or other, his clay.

Know that this universe is nothing but a dream bluff of nature to test your consciousness of immortality.

Happier are all men than the dwellers in Faerie – or the gods, for that matter…Better a life like a falling star, bright across the dark, than a deathlessness that can see naught above or beyond itself…the day draws nigh when Faerie shall fade, the Erlking himself shrink to a woodland sprite and then to nothing, and the gods go under. And the worst of it is, I cannot believe it wrong that the immortals will not live forever.

I believe people are genuinely good. I don’t like to see the bad in people, so because of that, I could see myself falling into a bad situation. But thankfully, I haven’t yet.

I couldn't fault her for believing, because I had to imagine i was nice to have that illusion still intact.

And a puzzle is for the piecing together, especially for the young, who still believe it can be done.

Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.

So I'll continue to continue to pretend my life will never end, and flowers never bend with the rainfall.

The great blessing and great cruelty of youth is that there seems to be time enough.

Do not believe yourself healthy. Immortality is health; this life is a long sickness.

I want to see everything. I guess the positive version of not seeing or not knowing would be preservation of fantasy.

Every new generation in its hour of dawn, filled with the dreams of youth, its thirsts, intoxications and enthusiasms, thinks itself called upon to impel humanity towards heights unmeasured, believes itself an appointed pathfinder, a thinker of thoughts, a doer of deeds greater than any of those which came before. Every new generation desires beauty, but a beauty all its own.

Old men are children once again a dream that sways and wavers into the hard light of day.

Oh youth, youth! You don't worry about anything; you seem to possess all the treasures of the universe--even sorrow gives you pleasure, even grief suits you.... And perhaps the whole secret of your charm lies not in your ability to do everything, but in your ability to think that you will do everything.

…what splendid dreams young people build upon a word, and how bitter is the pain when the bright bubbles burst.