Thornton Wilder Quotes

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.'

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

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The tiny tealeaf of consciousness spreads its bittersweet smoke through the sea of the primitive mind. Law is invented, then morality, then love, then forgiveness. Thousands and thousands of ideas, knit together over time, each one less practical and more ornamental than the last, all stretched taut above the wandering, wondering heads like a little pavilion a temporary shelter for the human project.

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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.

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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.

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

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

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Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent.

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Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.

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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.

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I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

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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.

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

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The best part of married life is the fights. The rests is merely so.

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

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It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.

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I was an old man when I was 12 and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID

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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. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg -- nine-tenths of him is under water.

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