Quotes by Tobias Wolff

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

Im a survivor, I said. But I didnt think that claim would carry much weight in an obituary.

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

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 its 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.

In the very act of writing I felt pleased with what I did. There was the pleasure of having words come to me, and the pleasure of ordering them, re-ordering them, weighing one against another. Pleasure also in the imagination of the story, the feeling that it could mean something. Mostly I was glad to find out that I could write at all. In writing you work toward a result you wont see for years, and cant be sure youll ever see. It takes stamina and self-mastery and faith. It demands those things of you, then gives them back with a little extra, a surprise to keep you coming. It toughens you and clears your head. I could feel it happening. I was saving my life with every word I wrote, and I knew it.

The human heart is a dark forest

Say youve just read Faulkners Barn Burning. Like the son in the story, youve sensed the faults in your fathers character. Thinking about them makes you uncomfortable, left alone youd probably close the book and move on to other thoughts. But instead you are taken in hand by a tall, brooding man with a distinguished limp who involves you and a roomful of other boys in the consideration of what it means to be a son. The loyalty that is your duty and your worth and your problem. The goodness of loyalty and its difficulties and snares, how loyalty might also become betrayal - of the self and the world outside the circle of blood. Youve never had this conversation before, not with anyone. And even as its happening you understand that just as your fathers troubles with the world - emotional frailty, self-doubt, incomplete honesty - will not lead him to set it on fire, your own loyalty will never be the stuff of tragedy. You will not turn bravely and painfully from your father, as the boy in the story does, but foresake him, without regret. And as you accept that separation, it seems to happen; your fathers sad, fleshy face grows vague, and you blink it away and look up to where your teachers leans against his desk, one hand in a coat pocket, the other rubbing his bum knee as he listens desolately to the clever bore behind you saying something about bird imagery.

I had never seen such sorrow; it appalled me. And I was even more appalled by her attempts to overcome it, because they so plainly, pathetically failed and in failing opened up a view of the world I had only begun to suspect, where wounds did not heal, and things did not work out for the best

Ive 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.

Why were Jack and his brother digging post holes? A fence there would run parallel to the one that already enclosed the farmyard. The Welches had no animals to keep in or out - a fence there could serve no purpose. Their work was pointless. Years later, while I was waiting for a boat to take me across the river, I watched two Vietnamese women methodically hitting a discarded truck tire with sticks. They did it for a good long while, and were still doing it when I crossed the river. They were part of the dream from which I recognized the Welches, my defeat-dream, my damnation-dream, with its solemn choreography of earnest useless acts.

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.

And I learned that its a bad idea to curse if youre in trouble, but a good idea to sing, if you can.

Had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story he’d led his boys to consider the folly of obsession with purity – its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering condemnation and violence against others and self.

In a world where the most consequential things happen by chance, or from unfathomable causes, you dont look to reason for help. You consort with mysteries... They have been killed in place of you - in your place. You dont think it out, not at the time, not in those terms, but you cant help but feel it, and go on feeling it. Its the close call you have to keep escaping from, the unending doubt that you have a right to your own life. Its the corruption suffered by everyone who lives on, that henceforth they must wonder at the reason and probe its justice.

We are made to persist.thats how we find out who we are.

I recognized no obstacle to miraculous change but the incredulity of others. This was an idea that died hard, if it ever really died at all.

Real maturity is the ability to imagine the humanity of every person as fully as you believe in your own humanity.

I teach one semester a year, and this year Im just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.