Thornton Wilder Quotes

"The best part of married life is the fights. The rests is merely so."

"Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech."

"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."

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

"The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape."

"The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose"

"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 wish"

"It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness."

"Literature is the orchestration of platitudes."

"When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift. There is no happiness save in understanding the whole."

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

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

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

"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."

"Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous."

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

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

"Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day."

"Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value."

"The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose."