Best Quotes by Thornton Wilder (Top 10)
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We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
Thornton Wilder
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There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
Thornton Wilder
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EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?" STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some.
Thornton Wilder
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My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
Thornton Wilder
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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?
Thornton Wilder
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But 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.
Thornton Wilder
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I didn't marry you because you were perfect. I didn't even marry you because I loved you. I married you because you gave me a promise. That promise made up for your faults. And the promise I gave you made up for mine. Two imperfect people got married and it was the promise that made the marriage. And when our children were growing up, it wasn't a house that protected them; and it wasn't our love that protected them—it was that promise.
Thornton Wilder
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Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer's day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.
Thornton Wilder
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If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good
Thornton Wilder
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All that we know about those we have loved and lost is that they would wish us to remember them with a more intensified realization of their reality. What is essential does not die but clarifies. The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
Thornton Wilder
More Thornton Wilder Quotes
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Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.
Thornton Wilder
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Faith is a never-ending pool of clarity, reaching far beyond the margins of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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A play visibly represents pure existing.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.
Thornton Wilder
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the whole purport of literature...is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.
Thornton Wilder
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Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
Thornton Wilder
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The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.
Thornton Wilder
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[Camila] was quite incapable of establishing any harmony between the claims of her art, of her appetites, or her dreams, and of her crowded daily routine. Each of these was a world in itself.
Thornton Wilder
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Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
Thornton Wilder
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That's the advantage of having lived sixty-five years. You don't feel the need to be impatient any longer.
Thornton Wilder
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Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Thornton Wilder
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The best thing about animals is that they don't talk much.
Thornton Wilder
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For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.
Thornton Wilder