Carolina QuotesGo, seeker, if you will, throughout the land and you will find us burning in the night.
Thomas Wolfe Carolinian
Source
Book IV, Ch. 31: The Promise of America
- work
- You Can't Go Home Again (1940)
- year
- 1940
Cite this record
“Go, seeker, if you will, throughout the land and you will fi…” Thomas Wolfe. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-6BD9E84FF3. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/6bd9e84ff3
More from Thomas Wolfe
So, then, to every man his chance—to every man, regardless of his birth, his shining, golden opportunity—to every man the right to live, to work, to be himself, and to become whatever thing his manhood and his vision can combine to make him — this, seeker, is the promise of America.
When we examine the moments, acts, and statements of all kinds of people- not only the grief and ecstasy of the greatest poets, but also the huge unhappiness of the average soul, as evidenced by the innumerable strident words of abuse, hatred, contempt, mistrust, and scorn that forever grate upon our ears as the manswarm passes us in the streets -- we find, I think, that they are all suffering from the same thing. The final cause of their complaint is loneliness.
And it was this that awed him — the weird combination of fixity and change, the terrible moment of immobility stamped with eternity in which, passing life at great speed, both the observer and the observed seem frozen in time.