Life & Wisdom Quote by Tobias Wolff

Memory here isn’t a dusty archive; it’s a live wire. Wolff’s “funny” isn’t sitcom funny so much as unnervingly perverse: the mind behaves like a body with its own pressure system, and once you nick it, it won’t politely drip. The metaphor does a lot of work fast. “Hit a vein” suggests accident and intimacy at once - you weren’t aiming for blood, but you found something vital. That’s how recollection often arrives in Wolff’s fiction and memoir: a smell, a sentence, an old address, and suddenly the past is not a story you tell but a substance that floods you.

The pivot is the quiet cruelty of the second clause. Most people imagine memory as a retrieval problem: How do I access what’s gone? Wolff flips it. The real crisis is management, not discovery. Once you’re in, you’re in. “Control the flow” frames remembering as a matter of regulation, even triage: deciding what to let out, what to staunch, what to risk reopening. It’s also an implicit craft statement. For a writer, the past is raw material with a pulse; the danger isn’t running out of it, but being overwhelmed by it, or turning private hemorrhage into public performance.

Context matters: Wolff’s work is crowded with moral self-scrutiny, the slipperiness of self-narration, the way autobiography tempts you to edit yourself into innocence. This line admits that memory has power and velocity, and it hints at the ethics of shaping it. Once the vein is open, control becomes the story - and the character test.