Best Quotes by Thornton Wilder (Top 10)

  1. We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.
  2. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
  3. EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?" STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some.
  4. My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
  5. 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?
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good
  10. 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.

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