Quotes from Thornton Wilder

When God loves a creature He wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery—then he can die. He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is His best gift.

While we are in love with a person our knowledge of his weaknesses lies lurking in the back of our minds and our idealization of the loved one is not so much an exaggeration of his excellence as a careful "rationalization" of his defects.

Doña Clara was in the hands of malignant Nature who reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.

Y qué queda cuando la memoria desaparece?

Wherever you come near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense. . .

she quoted the Spanish proverb, "The oak tree is in the acorn.

Live people don't understand, do they?

All I can say is, Emily, don't.

You not only live it; but you watch yourself living

keep them warm burn everything except Shakespeare.

Soothing stories have been plentiful in all ages. . . . To survive, a story must arouse wonder, wonder in both the senses in which we now employ the word: astonishment at the extent of man's capability of good and evil, and speculation as to the sources of that capability.

Three cheers have invented the wheel.

She looked at him a moment in silence and wonder. She did not yet know that she was a great actress—that the knowledge of how men and women behave in extremity was at the center of her lifework

You've got to love life to have life, and you've got to have life to love life. . . . It's what they call a vicious circle.

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Can't tell, Si. Never had no talent that way.

Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

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

The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.

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

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

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

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.

Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well.