106 Quotes by Tobias Wolff

Fearlessness in those without power is maddening to those who have it.

The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness.

There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer — because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.

a true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.

Knowing that everything comes to an end is a gift of experience, a consolation gift for knowing that we ourselves are coming to an end. Before we get it we live in a continuous present, and imagine the future as more of that present. Happiness is endless happiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain.

The life that produces writing can't be written about. Is is a life carried on without the knowledge even of the writer, below the mind's business and noise, in deep unlit shafts where phantom messengers struggle toward us, killing one another along the way; and when a few survivors break through to our attention they are received as blandly as waiters bringing more coffee.

And I learned that it's a bad idea to curse if you're in trouble, but a good idea to sing, if you can.

Whatever it is that makes closeness possible between people also puts them in the way of hard feelings if that closeness ends.

I've allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story.