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"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."
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"Women do not have as great a need for poetry because their own essence is poetry."
"Death, like a host, comes smiling to the door;Smiling, he greets us, on that tranquil shoreWhere neither piping bird nor peeping dawnDisturbs the eternal sleep,But in the stillness far withdrawnOur dreamless rest for evermore we keep."
"Poetry. i am not writing it.(make way for me please)it is my skin. dripping with light."
"Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting, Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them, And yet they expose me more than all my other poems."
"Justice is not Healing. Healing cometh only by suffering and patience, and maketh no demand, not even for Justice. Justice worketh only within the bonds of things as they are... and therefore though Justice is itself good and desireth no further evil, it can but perpetuate the evil that was, and doth not prevent it from the bearing of fruit in sorrow."
"Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words."
"I can write no stately proemAs a prelude to my lay;From a poet to a poemI would dare to say.For if of these fallen petalsOne to you seem fair,Love will waft it till it settlesOn your hair.And when wind and winter hardenAll the loveless land,It will whisper of the garden,You will understand."
"The secret of poetry is never explained - is always new. We have not got farther than mere wonder at the delicacy of the touch, & the eternity it inherits. In every house a child that in mere play utters oracles, & knows not that they are such. 'Tis as easy as breath. 'Tis like this gravity, which holds the Universe together, & none knows what it is."
Explore more quotes by 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."
"Because I don't have to be careful of people's feelings when I teach literature, and I do when I'm teaching writing."
"Work for most people is really very social, and the actual thinking is often done in community."
"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."
"Anybody can be very destructive in that position without at all meaning to be, and I know that I have been inadvertently destructive in the past for certain people on certain occasions."
"You have to be kind of clued into them, they are a world of their own, and most people find them disappointing because the best short stories are not constructed like novels."
"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."
"Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow."
"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."
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