Thornton Wilder Quotes - Page 2

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.

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

Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.

The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.

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

We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.

Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it -- every, every minute?

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

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

That's the advantage of having lived sixty-five years. You don't feel the need to be impatient any longer.

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

That’s what it was like 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. -Simon Stimson, OUR TOWN

A good writer preserves an air of freedom in his prose, so that the reader won't know how a story will end - even if he's reading a history book.

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

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.

It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.

The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.

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.

Faith is a never-ending pool of clarity, reaching far beyond the margins of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know.

A play visibly represents pure existing.

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.

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.

EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?" STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some.

you have to love life to have life, and you need to have life to love life

There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.