Quotes from Thornton Wilder

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.

Being employed is like being loved: you know that somebody's thinking about you the whole time.

So - people a thousand years from now...This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.

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

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

Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.

When you're safe at home you wish you were having an adventure; when you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.

Heaven's my destination.

There is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.

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

Even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other.

Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.

The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen, the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.

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.'

He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.

Everybody's talking about people breaking into houses but there are more people in the world who want to break out of houses.

I not only bow to the inevitable, I am fortified by it.

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

A play visibly represents pure existing.

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

A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference ... it pardons shortcomings; it consoles failure. It recommends moderation.

My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.

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.

But there comes a moment in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among the human beings or not - a fool among fools or a fool alone.