Thornton Wilder Quotes

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

It was full of wounding remarks rather brilliantly said, perhaps said for the sheer virtuosity of giving pain neatly. Each of its phrases found its way through the eyes of the Marquesa, then, carefully wrapped in understanding and forgiveness, it sank into her heart.

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.

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

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.

There is not a single untruth, no -but after ten lines Truth shrieks, she runs distraught and disheveled through her temple's corridors; she does not know herself. 'I can endure lies,' she cries. 'I cannot survive this stifling verisimilitude

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

Love as education is one of the great powers of the world, but it hangs in a delicate suspension; it achieves its harmony as seldom as does love by the senses. Frustrated, it creates even greater havoc, for like all love it is a madness.

Let us at least say of religion that it means that every part of the body is infused with mind, not that the mind is overwhelmed and drowned in body. For the principal attribute of the Gods, without or within us, is mind.

People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.

But while they continued staring into one another’s face waiting for the miracle of science the pain grew worse.

Listen, you are no longer a boy. You are forty. When will you learn not to wait for chance but to build on what you have and use each day to consolidate your position? Why have you never been anything more than Tribune? Because your plans always begin with next month.

Throughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations.

The marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she is a householder.

All of us have failed. One wishes to be punished. One is willing to assume all kinds of penance, but do you know, my daughter, that in love - I scarcely dare say it - but in love our very mistakes don't seem to be able to last long?

The central movement of the mind is the desire for unrestricted liberty and (...) this movement is invariably accompanied by its opposite, a dread of the consequences of liberty.

It is difficult, my dear Lucius, to escape becoming the person others believe one to be. A slave is twice enslaved, once by his chains and once again by the glances that fall upon him and say "thou slave.

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