Quotes from Thornton Wilder

She saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires. These

To survive, a story must arouse wonder.

Mi mindannyian, mindannyian vétkeztünk. Vezekelni akarunk. Szívesen magunkra vállalunk minden penitenciát, tudja meg azonban, leányom, hogy az, aki szeret - alig merem ezt kimondani -, az, aki igazán szeret, már alig-alig b?nös.

most végre tanuld meg, hogy bárhol e világon számíthatsz kegyelemre.

our town we like to know the facts about everybody.

But if our minds can make such Gods and if from the Gods we have made there flows such power, which is no more than a power resident within us, why cannot we employ that power directly?

There are times when it requires a high courage to speak the banal.

The discrepancy between faith and the facts is greater than is generally assumed.

Und daraus schöpfe ich die Bestätigung meiner Überzeugung, daß, was den Geist im Innersten bewegt, das Verlangen nach uneingeschränkter Freiheit ist, und daß dieser Drang ausnahmslos von seinem Gegenteil begleitet ist, von der Furcht vor den Folgen der Freiheit.

all the sacristies in town: they trimmed all the cloister hedges; they polished every possible crucifix; they

Each new child that's born to the Antrobuses seems to them to be sufficient reason for the whole universe's being set in motion; and each new child that dies seems to them to have been spared a whole world of sorrow, and what the end of it will be is still very much an open question.

I'll be scalded and tarred if a man can't get a little welcome when he comes home. Well, Maggie, you old gunny-sack, how's the broken down old weather hen?—Sabina, old fishbait, old skunkpot.—And the children,—how've the little smellers been?

Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.

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

For what human ill does dawn not seem to be an alleviation?

for falling into conversation with strangers; and that freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt for the dozing rich he preyed upon.

Caesar does not love, nor does he inspire love. He diffuses an equable sense of ordered good will, a passionless energy that creates without fever, and which expends itself without self-examination or self-doubt.

the theatre was the greatest of all the arts.

There is great comfort in knowing that those who love you love you enough to take the responsibility for marking out the permissible.

novelists only Nathaniel Hawthorne and Jorge Luis Borges have

We all know more than we know we know.

soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the 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.

I regard the theater 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. This supremacy of the theater derives from the fact that it is always "now" on the stage.

Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.