THOMAS WOLFE

Thomas Wolfe in " The Web And The Rock"

For pity, more than any other feeling, is a "learned" emotion; a child will have it least of all. Pity comes from the infinite accumulations of man's memory, from the anguish, pain, and suffering of life, from the full deposit of experience, from the forgotten faces, the lost men, and from the million strange and haunting visages of time. Pity comes upon the the nick of time and stabs us like a knife. Its face is thin and dark and burning, and it has come before we know it, gone before we can grasp or capture it; leaves a shrewed, deep wound, but a bitter, subtle one, and it always comes most keenly from a little thing.