Thornton Wilder Quotes

The most valuable thing I inherited was a temperament that does not revolt against Necessity and that is constantly renewed in Hope.

There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.

You've got to love life to have life, and you've got to have life to love life.

Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it — every, every minute?

On Friday noon, July twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travellers into the gulf below.

There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, only survival, the only meaning

I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for — whether it's a field, or a home, or a country.

Guile is the shield and spear of the oppressed.

Her religious beliefs went first, for all she could ask of a god, or of immortality, was the gift of a place where daughters love their mothers; the other attributes of Heaven you could have for a song.

There are few pleasures equal to that of imparting to a voracious learner the knowledge that one has grown old and weary in acquiring.

I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.

The best thing about animals is they don't talk much

"Esteban fell face downward upon the floor. "I am alone, alone, alone," he cried. The Captain stood above him, his great plain face ridged and gray with pain; it was his own old hours he was reliving. He was the awkwardest speaker in the world apart from the lore of the sea, but there are times when it requires a high courage to speak the banal. He could not be sure the figure on the floor was listening, but he said, "We do what we can. We push on, Esteban, as best we can. It isn't for long, you know. Time keeps going by. You'll be surprised at the way time passes.

Whom were these two seeking to please? Not the audiences of Lima. They had long since been satisfied. We come from a world where we have known incredible standards of [82] excellence, and we dimly remember beauties which we have not seized again; and we go back to that world. Uncle Pio and Camila Perichole were tormenting themselves in an effort to establish in Peru the standards of the theatres in some Heaven whither Calderon had preceded them. The public for which masterpieces are intended is not on this earth.

Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other.