Thornton Wilder citations

Page 2

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

“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.”

“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."”

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

“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.”

“Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.”

“Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.”

“Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.”

“Nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around it. Then you'll have the miser who's no liar; and the drunkard who's the benefactor of the whole city.”

“Many plays — certainly mine — are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.”

“I am not interested in the ephemeral — such subjects as the adulteries of dentists. I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat and repeat in the lives of the millions.”

“The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous…and the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight.”

“The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself, "Oh, now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home." And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.”

“I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.”

“Imagination draws on memory. Memory and imagination combined can stage a Servants' Ball or even write a book, if that's what they want to do.”

“Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.”

“Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.”

“Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes!) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.”

“The theatre is supremely fitted to say: "Behold! These things are." Yet most dramatists employ it to say: "This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action."”

“The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape.”

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

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

“Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.”

“The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.”

“Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.”

“A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference and a longer view and finds them incongruous. It dampens enthusiasm; it mocks hope; it pardons shortcomings; it consoles failure. It recommends moderation.”

“A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.”

“Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.”