W C Wolff Quotes & Sayings

I have very weirdly realistic dreams where it could be real life, except it's not. — Nat Wolff

Being sick successfully is not included in society's panoply of worthy goals. — Kaimana Wolff

His eyes were slitted and intense, like he might need to have sex at any moment. — Veronica Wolff

Anders turns and looks at him. He wants to hear Coyle's cousin repeat what he's just said, but he knows better than to ask. The others will think he's being a jerk, ragging the kid for his grammar. But that isn't it, not at all - it's that Anders is strangely roused, elated, by those final two words, their pure unexpectedness and their music. He takes the field in a trance, repeating them to himself. — Tobias Wolff

A cooperative enterprise is the key alternative to a traditional capitalist enterprise. All the workers, whatever they do inside an enterprise, have to be able to participate in collectively arriving at the decisions about what, how, where to produce, and what to do with the profits in a democratic way. One person, one vote should decide how these things are done. — Richard D. Wolff

I kind of help solve world peace and world hunger. That's just kind of an average day off for me. — Nat Wolff

answered the phone: "My — Geoffrey Wolff

Jazz is a constant theme in my life. My father is a jazz pianist, and from an early age I have been surrounded by it. — Nat Wolff

A master of tone and texture and an authority on the bizarre, Karen Russell writes with great flair and fearlessness. — Carlo Wolff

I need to tell you a story.'

What about?

Zachariah, Zachariah, my foundling boy. 'A boy. A boxer, a fighting man. A brother. No. About brothers, sisters. Foundlings, laid-in-the-streets. Fights, fighting. A boy, it all begins with the boy. My love. A wolf. Peter and the Wolf! Oh dear! I am very crazy! Let me - I must tell you this story.'

Why?

'I'm frightened.'

Of?

'Fractals. Patterns.'

Ah, says the fish, looking at Rachel with his wise eyes. Chaos!

'Yes,' thinks Rachel. 'Chaos. Fearful symmetry.'

Go home, says the fish, flipping over, flashing in light, and diving down into the great blue sea. — Emma Richler

Without pandering to your presumed desire to identify with the hero of a story, they made you feel that what mattered to the writer had consequence for you, too. — Tobias Wolff

The reaction of the people below to this fantastic sight and sound was one of wild excitement. Details could be seen vividly from aloft. An elderly man and woman fell to their knees and prayed. People in the villages stood still and gaped upward. Most of them still had their Sunday finery on. "You could see people going to church...man, wife, and child walking along the country roads." Bombardier Herbert Light, through his binoculars, saw an open-air festival in progress, with the women dressed in colorful skirts and blouses. One of them threw her apron over her head in panic.
As they roared over the wheat fields, the first unfriendly acts occurred: farmers threw stones and pitchforks at them. One farmer leading two horses was startled by the advancing planes and leaped into a nearby stream. A girl swimming in another river was reported by ten separate crews. — Leon Wolff

If you want something to grow and be so beautiful you could have a nice day just from looking at it, you have to wait. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

In order for us to live comfortably with ourselves while living on unjust terms with others, we have to tell ourselves a story that makes us innocent. — Tobias Wolff

The teenage years are the years to examine faith - the need to be independent and the need to be anchored. Who made all this? And what do I have to do with it? — Virginia Euwer Wolff

In America, we debate everything except capitalism. If there's an institution in your society that's above criticism, you're giving it a free pass to indulge all of its weaknesses and darker tendencies. — Richard D. Wolff

No one writes as slowly as I do, I'm convinced. It's so hard for me. I learn slowly; I make decisions at a snail's pace. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

The very act of writing assumes, to begin with, that someone cares to hear what you have to say. It assumes that people share, that people can be reached, that people can be touched and even in some cases changed. So many of the things in our world lead us to despair. It seems to me that the final symptom of despair is silence, and that storytelling is one of the sustaining arts; it's one of the affirming arts. A writer may have a certain pessimism in his outlook, but the very act of being a writer seems to me to be an optimistic act. — Tobias Wolff

E felt no more than a boy again-but a very well-versed boy who couldn't help thinking of the scene described by these old words, surely the most beautiful words written or said: His father, when he saw him coming, ran to meet him. — Tobias Wolff

The world doesn't revolve around you, Drew."
"Well, my world does. — Veronica Wolff

Some people make a bad bed, they just have to lie in it. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

You were banging hard enough to wake the dead."
"And you're lovely enough to rouse them. — Veronica Wolff

Reviewers have called my books 'novels in verse.' I think of them as written in prose, but I do use stanzas. Stanza means 'room' in Latin, and I wanted there to be 'room' - breathing opportunities to receive thoughts and have time to come out of them before starting again at the left margin. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

I tell you this because books for young readers are so often written about that very moment: the moment of the fork. The moment the old man cannot return to. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

A piece of writing is a dangerous thing," he said. "It can change your life. — Tobias Wolff

Tall, dark, and hot leaned against a pillar, watching me as I took my place in line. Tousled dark hair went every which way on his head. His eyes were slitted and intense, like he might need to have sex at any moment. Maybe even with me. — Veronica Wolff

In Edmund Gosse, Agnes Smedley, Geoffrey Wolff, we have a set of memoirists whose work records a steadily changing idea of the emergent self. But for each of them a flash of insight illuminating that idea grew out of the struggle to clarify one's own formative experience; and in each case the strength and beauty of the writing lie in the power of concentration with which this insight is pursued, and made to become the the writer's organizing principle. That principle at work is what makes a memoir literature rather than testament. — Vivian Gornick

There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody. — Tobias Wolff

I was a sitting duck myself, and Arthur had a map of my nerves. — Tobias Wolff

Since I was a kid. I had this series by Ballantine Books about the history of World Wars I and II. In my 20s, it was the Vietnam War literature of novelists like Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, and Tobias Wolff, and then nonfiction such as "A Bright Shining Lie" by Neil Sheehan and "The Best and Brightest" by David Halberstam . Those are the two best histories of Vietnam. — George Packer