Wolff Quotes & Sayings

He could add something to the list of things you weren't supposed to do. Don't get hurt, don't get dirty, don't get drunk, don't get scared, don't count on it. You ended up doing all of them. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

Hopes are so well constructed, so monstrously dashed! — Emma Richler

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

I didn't trust such general greatness one little bit. — Veronica Wolff

I would not describe myself as an avid jazz fan and I am not a jazz musician myself. However, that is not to say that jazz does not play a vital and important role in my life. — Nat Wolff

He told me that a German doctor named Wolff figured it out in the 1800s by studying X-rays of infants' hips as they transitioned from crawling to walking. "A whole new evolution of bone structure takes place to support the mechanical loads associated with walking," said Lang. "Wolff had the great insight that form follows function." Alas, Wolff did not have the great insight that cancer follows gratuitous X-raying with primitive nineteenth-century X-ray machines. — Mary Roach

Yes, indeed, I am the stuff, the prize property, the recaptured trophy he will put up on the mantelpiece, in a rage every time I move a millimeter or look less polished, less tarted up than he thinks I should look. In a rage, every time I disappoint him. Which will happen every day. — Kaimana Wolff

It's just become such a business, getting into college. I see that a lot in my friends, their parents were so on top of them about getting into an Ivy League school since they were so young, they were just drilled and drilled and drilled, to the point that they just don't know why they want to go. — Nat Wolff

While I fold laundry I memorize things for school,
dates of wars:
French ones, African ones, Russian ones,
battles of all ugly kinds.
It's a shame to have us hopeful young students
learn these horrible things.
Exactly the kind of behaving
they have told us over and over again not to do
is what the history class is full of,
full-grown adults making these wars:
killing each other for land, for religions,
for greed and more greed,
Why bother to have children and educate them
and invent things to make their lives better,
just to send them off to war and get slaughtered? — Virginia Euwer Wolff

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. — Tobias Wolff

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

To the celestial Rose, who drew me into her lovely orbit. With love and gratitude, Theo. — Isabel Wolff

The word "collective" is not so often used because it has been basically used by socialists and communists and has a different history. The word "cooperative" means the workplace itself is organized cooperatively, rather than in the conventional capitalistic, hierarchical form. — Richard D. Wolff

Getting from La Jolla to Alta Vista State Hospital isn't easy, unless you have a car or a breakdown. April's Father had a breakdown and they got him there in no time. — Tobias 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

Somehow it felt familiar, an old story retold, the claws in my shoulder, my arms twisted behind my back, the drag down the street, Will assisting my father and thinking how much fun it was to hunt someone down. I knew it all. Each snarled command was a line from an old but faithless song. "Pipe down! I'm not going to hurt you! I just want to talk to you! This is for your own good! — Kaimana 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 sure would like to get kissed.
How would that feel on my mouth,
How different would I be after,
a changed climate down in my insides? — Virginia Euwer Wolff

No cheap tricks. — Geoffrey Wolff

To learn something, to master something, anything, is as sweet as first love. — Geoffrey Wolff

I grew up in rural Oregon in a log house with bark left on inside and out. We had no electricity, a massive stone fireplace, a grand piano, and tons of books. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

How many neighbors ignoring Jolly for her ignorance and bad luck could go down on their knees and save their kid from choking to death this afternoon while the world was going on outside in the sunshine? — Virginia Euwer Wolff

I wouldn't let him distract me. "Your accent gets thicker when you're being ... improper."
"Improper, is it?"
"Inappropriate."
"Indelicate?" He waggled his brows just before her rounded a corner, disappearing into shadows. — Veronica Wolff

I love your loins, that's all,' Rachel says quietly. 'And now I love the word itself, and how words change, I love that too. And all the parts of you, I love them. That's all. And I'm not sad,' she whispers, gasping a little at the shock of her own tears, hot and extravagant, tears that catch the light in her lashes before they drop and roll across Zach's thighs, sparkling capsules, kaleidoscopic, the flow dynamic. — Emma Richler

To be a writer you need to see things as they are, and to see things as they are you need a certain basic innocence. — Tobias Wolff

Most people I know don't even realize I'm an award-winning author, but I have gotten many opportunities to travel to places I'd never have visited otherwise. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

Our memories tell us who we are and they cannot be achieved through committee work, by consulting other people about what happened. That doesn't mean that at all times memories are telling us the absolute truth, but that the main source of who we are is that memory, flawed or not. — Tobias Wolff

I've no idea when I'm going to wear it, the girl replied calmly. I only knew that I had to have it. Once I tried it on, well ... She shrugged. The dress claimed me. — Isabel Wolff

Most music is metaphor, but Wolff is not. I am not metaphor either. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon. — Morton Feldman

A year later, there is another miscarriage, another lost boy, and then an operation, and Rachel is in a muddle. Another missed carriage, she hears, conjuring a vision of Mama in a typical dash from the house, hurrying for trains to other cities where she will conduct music and choirs. Rachel sees Katya on a railway platform, suitcase and baton box in hand, but Mama is too late, the train hurtles by, screaming through the arches, a great train of missed carriages. Rachel's night-time wish is granted then, that though Katya has left her once again, she must return home as quickly. She has missed her carriage.

'Mama,' Rachel whispers into the night bedroom air, 'Mama, hurry home! — Emma Richler

Men have special needs too: for example, a man generally needs a higher daily intake of calories than a woman. But this has never been though of as a sign of men's inferiority to women; if anything, it is a sign of strength and an entitlement to extra food. — Jonathan Wolff

Because I don't think I have a handle on how to write for grown-ups. The grown-up publishing world is so fraught with one-upsmanship, scorn and snobbery. I did write an adult novel. Thank goodness it went out of print. I think we kids' authors still start out with hope every morning. We honor our audience. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

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

I love James Taylor, Jeff Buckley, Elliott Smith and Nine Inch Nails. — Nat Wolff

... why would Caesar fear Ovid, except for knowing that neither his divinity nor all his legions could protect him from a good line of poetry. — Tobias Wolff

And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers. — Tobias Wolff

You ever laughed so hard
nobody in the world could hurt you for a minute,
no matter what they tried to do to you? — Virginia Euwer Wolff

Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction - so we are told. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

I was giving up
being realistic, as people liked to say, meaning the same thing. Being realistic made me feel bitter. — Tobias Wolff

Meeting your adoptive baby is like being set up on a blind date with someone you will have to spend the next eighteen years with. You care about looks, because you desperately want to fall in love with the stranger who will be your child. — Jana Wolff

I think music is my favorite thing to do, but I go through periods where I think differently. — Nat Wolff

It appeared that spending my formative years getting smacked around by my dad may have earned me the privileged of getting smacked around by a bunch of vampires. — Veronica Wolff

Who you choose to surround yourself with will determine if you fail, or if you will succeed. Assets are people who will support you, build you up, and encourage you. Liabilities are people who will tear you down, discourage you, and give you reasons why you can't do whatever it is you want to do. Minimize the liabilities and you'll go far in life. — Steven Wolff

Surely there was at least one other girl on campus not sporting a French pedicure (do girls really think we're fooled by the little white lines painted across their toenails?), who had some black in her wardrobe, and actually thought about things. You know, someone who knew the word French could imply more than just a way to kiss. — Veronica Wolff

I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don't make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves - people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing. — Chad Harbach

In the meantime, most noble Sir, you have assigned this question to the geometry of position, but I am ignorant as to what this new discipline involves, and as to which types of problem Leibniz and Wolff expected to see expressed in this way. — Leonhard Euler

Lose Faith. Pray anyway. Persist. We are made to persist, to complete the whole tour. That's how we find out who we are. — Tobias Wolff

It's jarring to go from one amazing experience to another that feels ordinary. I don't quite know how to explain it. You see the uniqueness of what you've been doing, and disassociating yourself from it and going back to the 'normal' life is tough. — Nat Wolff

I was once a man. As not all men are good, not all vampires are evil. — Veronica Wolff

I work early in the morning, before my nasty critic gets up - he rises about noon. By then, I've put in much of a day's work. — Virginia Euwer Wolff

We even talked like Hemingway characters, though in travesty, as if to deny our discipleship: That is your bed, and it is a good bed, and you must make it and you must make it well. Or: Today is the day of the meatloaf. The meatloaf is swell. It is swell but when it is gone the not-having meatloaf will be tragic and the meatloaf man will not come anymore. — Tobias Wolff

Why don't you just put me down for a couple of boxes of cookies and go earn your next patch bothering someone else." - Jayke Wolff — Shawn Keenan

Waldemar Haffkine [is] a saviour of humanity. — Joseph Lister

I have learned a lot from jazz. I compare good acting to jazz music. The more you study and prepare as an actor, the more equipped you are to live in the moment. Just like the gifted musicians in my dad's quartet, it takes a courageous actor to be free. — Nat Wolff

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

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

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

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

answered the phone: "My — Geoffrey 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

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

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

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

I'm a survivor, I said. But I didn't think that claim would carry much weight in an obituary. — Tobias Wolff

We change, but always at a cost: to win this you lose that. — Geoffrey Wolff

I need to tell you a story, a tale of fate and emergence. — Emma Richler

When I was about 14 or 15 I decided to become a writer and never for a moment since have I wanted to do anything else. — Tobias Wolff

It takes a childish or corrupt imagination to make symbols of other people. — Tobias Wolff

I'm lucky that I got to start acting when I was so young, and people put me in these movies. A lot of people don't get to play these parts because they start a little older. — Nat Wolff

The capitalist workplace is one of the most profoundly undemocratic institutions on the face of the Earth. Workers have no say over decisions affecting them. If workers sat on the board of directors of democratically operated self-managed enterprises, they wouldn't vote for the wildly unequal distribution of profits to benefit a few and for cutbacks for the many. — Richard D. Wolff

A lot of times people come up to me saying 'oh my god you can see,' and they think they're the first person to think of that joke, but they're probably the 10,000th one to say that joke. — Nat Wolff

Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for over 160 million years. — Wolff, Becky

There's ALWAYS a way to fix something. — Steven Wolff

Ishmael was looking at him through narrowed eyes. "This is very important to you, this box."
"It's important to the world."
Ishmael said: "The sun rises, and the sun sets. Sometimes it rains. We live, then we die." He shrugged.
He would never understand, Wolff thought; but others would. — Ken Follett

For every tear drop you cry, I will turn them into rainbows... So the world can see you for who you really are and that is a beautiful star! — Linda J. Wolff

In 1907 Edmund Gosse thought he had to leave his father to become himself; seventy years later Geoffrey Wolff knows he cannot leave his father because he has become his father. — Vivian Gornick

Now, everybody knows my music. So that's really cool. A lot of kids know it. Now, when I go to a sports game, everybody knows my name. — Nat Wolff

How wonderful it must be, to be unable to remember things that once caused us distress. Yet we should embrace all our memories, whether joyful or painful. They're all we ever really own in this life. — Isabel Wolff

There's no master plan; I'm just going with what I'm inspired to do and what I get asked to do, and luckily the things I've been the most passionate about, I've gotten to do. And a lot of times I've gone up for movies that I didn't really care that much about, and I never got that. — Nat Wolff

In a bravura demonstration of stonewalling, righteousness, and hurt sincerity, Steve Jobs successfully took to the stage the other day to deny the problem, dismiss the criticism, and spread the blame among other smartphone makers.". "This is a level of modern marketing, corporate spin, and crisis management about which you can only ask with stupefied incredulity and awe: How do they get away with it? Or, more accurately, how does he get away with it?" Wolff attributed it to Jobs's mesmerizing effect as "the last charismatic individual." Other CEOs would be offering abject apologies and swallowing massive recalls, but Jobs didn't have to. "The grim, skeletal appearance, the absolutism, the ecclesiastical bearing, the sense of his relationship with the sacred, really works, and, in this instance, allows him the privilege of magisterially deciding what is meaningful and what is trivial. — Walter Isaacson

But it's so silly, Mama!' pipes Zach, protesting with all the might of his twelve-year-old bellows and leaping to his feet, chest puffed, to fling a proprietary arm around his sister who fits so neatly in the crook of him, as if wrought for this place. He speaks for them both, though Rachel is some months his elder. — Emma Richler

ROBERT MASELLO is the author of many previous works of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the novels Blood and Ice and The Medusa Amulet. A native of Evanston, Illinois, he studied writing under the novelists Robert Stone and Geoffrey Wolff at Princeton, and has since taught and lectured at many leading universities. For six years, he was the visiting lecturer in literature at Claremont McKenna College. He now lives and works in Santa Monica, — Robert Masello

Most of us don't live lives that lend themselves to novelistic expression, because our lives are so fragmented. — Tobias 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

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 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