Thornton Wilder Quotes

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

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

Source: The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)
Context: Soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

“EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it… every, every minute?"

STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe… they do some.”

"Emily Webb"
Our Town (1938)
Context: I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back — up the hill — to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by Grover's Corners... Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking... and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths... and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.... Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? — Every, every minute?... I'm ready to go back... I should have listened to you. That's all human beings are! Just blind people.

“The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.”

Source: Our Town

“Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.”

“The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.”

Source: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Thornton Wilder Quotes about love

“Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.”

Source: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

“Being employed is like being loved: you know that somebody's thinking about you the whole time.”

As quoted in "The Notation of the Heart" by Edmund Fuller, in The American Scholar Reader (1960) edited by Hiram Hayden and Betsy Saunders

“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.”

Source: The Matchmaker

“Love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it gives birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties.”

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)

“Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.”

As quoted in "The Notation of the Heart" by Edmund Fuller, in The American Scholar Reader (1960) edited by Hiram Hayden and Betsy Saunders

“People are meant to go through life two by two. 'Tain't natural to be lonesome.”

TIME magazine (3 February 1958)

Thornton Wilder Quotes about life

“Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.”

"Mrs. Gibbs"
Source: Our Town (1938)

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?”

Source: Our Town

“Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.”

Source: Our Town

“We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind.”

Source: Our Town

Thornton Wilder: Trending quotes

Thornton Wilder book The Eighth Day

The Eighth Day (1967)

“I hate this play and every word in it.”

“Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.”

Sabina
The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)

“Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

Dolly Levi, in Act 4 http://books.google.com/books?id=MAEJ8VP0rMYC&q=%22Money+is+like+manure+it's+not+worth+a+thing+unless+it's+spread+around+encouraging+young+things+to+grow%22&pg=PA110#v=onepage <br class="br">Source: The Matchmaker (1954)

Thornton Wilder Quotes

“That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those… of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another.”

Source: Our Town

“I realize that every writer is necessarily a critic — that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on.”

"Simon Stimson"
Our Town (1938)
Context: That's what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those... of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know — that's the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.

“I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize.”

Writers at Work interview (1958)
Context: I think myself as a fabulist, not a critic. I realize that every writer is necessarily a critic — that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. But, as I have just suggested, I believe that the practice of writing consists in more and more relegating all that schematic operation to the subconscious. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg — nine-tenths of him is underwater.

“There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.”

Thornton Wilder book The Eighth Day

The Eighth Day (1967)
Context: When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery … He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift…. There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.

“My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate — that's my philosophy.”

“Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer's day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”

Sabina, Act One
The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)

“If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good”

Source: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

“Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.”

“Wherever you come near the human race there's layers and layers of nonsense.”

Source: Our Town

“Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.”

"Stage Manager"
Source: Our Town (1938)

“Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It's your combination sinners — your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards — who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute.”

“One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries them.”

Malachi, in Act 3
The Matchmaker (1954)

“A man looks pretty small at a wedding, George. All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder, making sure that the knot's tied in a mighty public way.”

Writers at Work interview (1958)

“I hold that we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.”

"Mr. Webb"
Our Town (1938)

Thornton Wilder book The Ides of March

The Ides of March (1948), sec. VIII, item 977, p. 34 http://books.google.com/books?id=8IgRAAAAMAAJ&q=%22I+hold+that+we+cannot+be+said+to+be+aware+of+our+minds+save+under+responsibility%22&pg=PA34#v=onepage

“The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.”

Thornton Wilder book The Eighth Day

The Eighth Day (1967)

“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.”

“On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being; the words are rising to their lips in immediate spontaneity … The theater is supremely fitted to say: "Behold! These things are."”

Antrobus, in Act 3
The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)

“Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.”

Writers at Work interview (1958)