Liar Tobias Wolff Quotes

Yeah, well," I say, "I left Abnegation because I wasn't selfless enough, no matter how hard I tried to be."
"That's not entirely true." He smiles at me. "That girl who let someone throw knives at her to spare a friend, who hit my dad with a belt to protect me-that selfless girl, that's not you?" ...
"You've been paying close attention, haven't you?"
"I like to observe people/"
"Maybe you were cut out for Candor, Four, because you're a terrible liar. ~ Veronica Roth

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

Writers, to my way of thinking, are no more free in their choices than most people. Our material chooses us; certain things engage us, certain things do not. ~ Tobias Wolff

The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story. ~ Tobias Wolff

I had no right to see them this way. ~ Tobias Wolff

The human heart is a dark forest ~ Tobias Wolff

That became my aesthetic - a very Chekhovian, American realist aesthetic in the tradition of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, and Tobias Wolff. The perfectible, realist story that had these somewhat articulate characters, a lot of silence, a lot of obscured suffering, a lot of manliness, a lot of drinking, a lot of divorces. As my writing went on, I shed a lot of those elements. ~ Jess Row

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

Rhyme is bullshit. Rhyme says that everything works out in the end. All harmony and order. When I see a rhyme in a poem, I know I'm being lied to. Go ahead, laugh! It's true - rhyme's a completely bankrupt device. It's just wishful thinking. Nostalgia. ~ Tobias Wolff

We are made to persist. That's how we find out who we are. ~ Tobias Wolff

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 ~ Tobias Wolff

The bullet is already in the brain; it won't be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt. In the end it will
do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet's tail of memory and hope and
talent and love into the marble hall of commerce. ~ Tobias Wolff

We each after a while have to become reconciled to what it is that our talents and appetites lead us to. ~ Tobias Wolff

I tell you, the one thing I hate is an absolutist. I hate absolutist ideologies, I hate absolutist aesthetics, I hate absolutist theologies, they're the burden and bane of this world. ~ Tobias Wolff

Because the more you write the more you're aware of the weight of your tradition and the difficulties of the form and the more you have already done that you do not want to do again. ~ Tobias Wolff

And in my heart I despised the life I led in Seattle. I was sick of it and had no idea how to change it. I thought that in Chinook, away from Taylor and Silver, away from Marian, away from people who had already made up their minds about me, I could be different. I could introduce myself as a scholar-athlete, a boy of dignity and consequence, and without any reason to doubt me people would believe I was that boy, and thus allow me to be that boy. 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. ~ 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

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

You don't teach information in a writing workshop. ~ Tobias Wolff

I believe that the short story is as different a form from the novel as poetry is, and the best stories seem to me to be perhaps closer in spirit to poetry than to novels. ~ Tobias 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

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

You boys know what tropism is, it's what makes a plant grow toward the light. Everything aspires to the light. You don't have to chase down a fly to get rid of it - you just darken the room, leave a crack of light in a window, and out he goes. Works every time. We all have that instinct, that aspiration. Science can't dim that. All science can do is turn out the false lights so the true light can get us home. ~ Tobias Wolff

It's probably why I'm a short story writer. I tend to remember things in the past in narrative form, in story form, and I grew up around people who told stories all the time. ~ Tobias Wolff

We didn't know it then,' Hooper said. 'We used to talk about how when we got back in the world we were going to do this and we were going to do that. Back in the world we were going to have it made. But ever since then it's been nothing but confusion.' Hooper took the cigarette case from his pocket but didn't open it. He leaned forward on the table.
'Everything was clear,' he said. 'You learned what you had to know and you forgot the rest. All this chickenshit. This clutter. You didn't spend every living minute of the day thinking about your own sorry-ass little self. Am I getting laid enough. What's wrong with my kid. Should I insulate the fucking house. That's what does it to you, Porchoff. Thinking about yourself. That's what kills you in the end. ~ Tobias Wolff

Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow. ~ Tobias Wolff

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

One of the last courses I taught was on the Russian short story, which I love. ~ Tobias Wolff

I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm 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. ~ 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

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

What writers do is they tell their own story constantly through other people's stories. They imagine other people, and those other people are carrying the burden of their struggles, their questions about themselves. ~ Tobias 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

He did not remember when he began to regard the heap of books on his desk with boredom and dread, or when he grew angry at writers for writing them. He did not remember when everything began to remind him of something else. ~ Tobias Wolff