{"author":"Tobias Wolff","author_id":"Tobias+Wolff","total_quotes":18,"quotes":[{"text":"The human heart is a dark forest.","author":"Tobias Wolff","tags":["desire","heart","human-condition"],"id":8471,"author_id":"Tobias+Wolff"},{"text":"In a world where the most consequential things happen by chance, or from unfathomable causes, you don't look to reason for help. You consort with mysteries... They have been killed in place of you - in your place. You don't think it out, not at the time, not in those terms, but you can't help but feel it, and go on feeling it. It's the close call you have to keep escaping from, the unending doubt that you have a right to your own life. It's the corruption suffered by everyone who lives on, that henceforth they must wonder at the reason and probe its justice.","author":"Tobias Wolff","tags":["death","memoir","vietnam","war"],"id":55527,"author_id":"Tobias+Wolff"},{"text":"Had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story he’d led his boys to consider the folly of obsession with purity – its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering condemnation and violence against others and self.","author":"Tobias Wolff","tags":["hawthorne","nonviolence","purity","violence"],"id":99669,"author_id":"Tobias+Wolff"},{"text":"A true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.","author":"Tobias Wolff","tags":["books","life","writing"],"id":108959,"author_id":"Tobias+Wolff"},{"text":"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.","author":"Tobias Wolff","tags":["liberty","obligation","solitude","writer","writing"],"id":133806,"author_id":"Tobias+Wolff"},{"text":"Real maturity is the ability to imagine the humanity of every person as fully as you believe in your own humanity.","author":"Tobias Wolff","tags":["maturity"],"id":187915,"author_id":"Tobias+Wolff"},{"text":"We are made to persist.That's how we find out who we are.","author":"Tobias Wolff","tags":["persistence","trial"],"id":188982,"author_id":"Tobias+Wolff"},{"text":"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.","author":"Tobias Wolff","tags":["writing","people","working "],"id":326513,"author_id":"Tobias+Wolff"},{"text":"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.","author":"Tobias Wolff","tags":["change-your-life"],"id":329906,"author_id":"Tobias+Wolff"},{"text":"The beauty of a fragment is that it still supports the hope of brilliant completeness.","author":"Tobias Wolff","tags":["hope","longing"],"id":337331,"author_id":"Tobias+Wolff"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":18,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}