Thornton Wilder: Quotes about love

Thornton Wilder was American playwright and novelist. Explore interesting quotes on love.
Thornton Wilder: 122 quotes11 likes

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

Thornton Wilder book The Bridge of San Luis Rey

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.

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

Thornton Wilder book The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Source: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

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

Thornton Wilder The Matchmaker

Source: The Matchmaker

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

Thornton Wilder

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.”

Thornton Wilder book The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)

“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.”

Thornton Wilder

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

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

Thornton Wilder

TIME magazine (3 February 1958)

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

Thornton Wilder

New York Journal-American (11 November 1955)