Thornton Wilder

Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.

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

A dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and countershocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment.

On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor-edge, between the past and the future, w'hich is the essential character of conscious being.

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

The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous—and can shatter the world. And the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight—and that, also, can shatter the world.

There’s nothing like mixing with woman to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.

There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well.

A curious and eager soul was imprisoned in all this lard, but by dint of never refusing himself a pheasant or a goose or his daily procession of Roman wines, he was his own bitter jailer.

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

People were always asking for good sound proofs; doubt springs eternal in the human breast, even in countries where the Inquisition can read your very thoughts in your eyes.

On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.

The best thing about animals is that they don’t talk much.

Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

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

I’ve never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for—whether it’s a field, or a home, or a country.

Money—pardon my expression—money is like manure; it’s not worth a thing unless it’s spread around encouraging young things to grow.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

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.

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

George Brush is my name America’s my nation Luddington’s my dwelling place And Heaven’s my destination.

The important thing is that you make sure that neither the favorable nor the unfavorable critics move into your head and take part in the composition of your next work.