Thornton Wilder
Enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.Collection: Life
Every person who has ever lived has lived an unbroken succession of unique occasions.Collection: Unique
There is no need for me to curse you -the murderer survives the victim only to learn that it was himself that he longed to be rid of. Hatred is self-hatred.Collection: Self
We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being. -stage manager, in the play OUR TOWNCollection: Stars
Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.Collection: Intelligence
Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It's your combination sinners - your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards - who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute.Collection: Integrity
Every writer is necessarily a critic - that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg - nine-tenths of him is under water.Collection: Skeletons
The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.Collection: Earth
Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth dayCollection: Children
Heaven's my destination.Collection: Travel
For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?Collection: Health
A man looks pretty small at a wedding, George. All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder, making sure that the knot's tied in a mighty public way.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Youth
[Dona Maria] saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires.Collection: Self
Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.Collection: Moon
That's the advantage of having lived sixty-five years. You don't feel the need to be impatient any longer.Collection: Years
We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.Collection: Life
Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.Collection: Important
Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.Collection: Promise
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?Collection: Earth
That’s what it was like to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those...of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know- that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness. -Simon Stimson, OUR TOWNCollection: Time
A good writer preserves an air of freedom in his prose, so that the reader won't know how a story will end - even if he's reading a history book.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Home
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.Collection: Happiness
The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.Collection: Waiting
Faith is a never-ending pool of clarity, reaching far beyond the margins of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know.Collection: Clarity
you have to love life to have life, and you need to have life to love lifeCollection: Love Life
There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.Collection: Night
EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?" STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some.Collection: Doe
I want you to try and remember what it was like to have been very young. And particularly the days when you were first in love; when you were like a person sleepwalking, and you didn’t quite see the street you were in, and didn’t quite hear everything that was said to you. You’re just a little bit crazy. Will you remember that, please?Collection: Crazy
I not only bow to the inevitable; I am fortified by it.Collection: Hope
There is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.Collection: Truth
Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.Collection: Encouraging
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.Collection: Summer
I have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclapsCollection: Men
Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but theremay never be two that love one another equally well.Collection: Beautiful
I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Heart
There are the stars--doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings out there. Just chalk... or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. Strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.Collection: Stars
All excellence is equally difficult.Collection: Excellence
Being employed is like being loved: you know that somebody's thinking about you the whole time.Collection: Thinking About You
[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.Collection: Dream
true influence over another comes not from a moments eloquence nor from any happily chosen word, but from the accumulation of a lifetime's thoughts stored up in the eyes...the secret smile in the eyes of a friendCollection: Eye
You swore you loved me, and laughed and warned me that you would not love me forever. I did not hear you. You were speaking in a language I did not understand. Never, never, I can conceive of a love which is able to foresee its own termination. Love is its own eternity. Love is in every moment of its being: all time. It is the only glimpse we are permitted of what eternity is. So I did not hear you. The words were nonsense.Collection: Love
Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.Collection: Existence
Comparisons of one's lot with others' teaches us nothing and enfeebles the will.Collection: Teach
How terrifying and glorious the role of man if, indeed, without guidance and without consolation he must create from his own vitals the meaning for his existence and write the rules whereby he lives.Collection: Writing
Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover's Corners... Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking... and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths...and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.Collection: Coffee
The dead don't stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they let go hold of the earth . . . and the ambitions they had . . . and the things they suffered . . . and the people they loved. They get weaned away from the earth - that's the way I put it - weaned away.Collection: Letting Go