Best 159 quotes of Thornton Wilder on MyQuotes

Thornton Wilder

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    Thornton Wilder

    A convention is an agreed-upon falsehood, a permitted lie.

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    Thornton Wilder

    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.

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    Thornton Wilder

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

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    Thornton Wilder

    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.

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    Thornton Wilder

    A living is made, Mr Kemper, by selling something that everybody needs at least once a year.Yes, sir! And a million ismade by producing something that everybody needs every day.You artists produce something that nobody needs at any time.

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    Thornton Wilder

    All excellence is equally difficult.

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    Thornton Wilder

    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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    Thornton Wilder

    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.

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    Thornton Wilder

    A play visibly represents pure existing.

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    Thornton Wilder

    A purpose is the eternal condition of success.

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    Thornton Wilder

    A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. It pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure.

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    Thornton Wilder

    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.

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    Thornton Wilder

    But such occasions of excellence became less and less frequent. As her technique became sounder, [her] sincerity became less necessary.

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    Thornton Wilder

    But there comes a time in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among human beings or nota fool among fools or a fool alone.

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    Thornton Wilder

    [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.

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    Thornton Wilder

    Characterization in a play is like a blank check which the dramatist accords to the actor for him to fill in.

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    Thornton Wilder

    Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.

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    Thornton Wilder

    Comparisons of one's lot with others' teaches us nothing and enfeebles the will.

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    Thornton Wilder

    Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?

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    Thornton Wilder

    Doctors are mostly impostors. The older a doctor is and the more venerated he is, the more he must pretend to know everything. Of course, they grow worse with time. Always look for a doctor who is hated by the best doctors. Always seek out a bright young doctor before he comes down with nonsense.

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    Thornton Wilder

    [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.

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    Thornton Wilder

    Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.

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    Thornton Wilder

    EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?" STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some.

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    Thornton Wilder

    Enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.

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    Thornton Wilder

    Even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other.

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    Thornton Wilder

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

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    Thornton Wilder

    Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.

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    Thornton Wilder

    Every person who has ever lived has lived an unbroken succession of unique occasions.

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    Thornton Wilder

    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.

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    Thornton Wilder

    Faith is a never-ending pool of clarity, reaching far beyond the margins of consciousness. We all know more than we know we know.

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    Thornton Wilder

    For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?

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    Thornton Wilder

    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.

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    Thornton Wilder

    Heaven's my destination.

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    Thornton Wilder

    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.

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    Thornton Wilder

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

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    Thornton Wilder

    How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you rip the fronts off houses you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?

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    Thornton Wilder

    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.

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    Thornton Wilder

    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.

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    Thornton Wilder

    I am my own judge of what truths I shall tell. The truth can do just as much harm as a lie.

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    Thornton Wilder

    I am not interested in the ephemeral - such subjects as the adulteries of dentists. I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat and repeat in the lives of the millions.

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    Thornton Wilder

    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.

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    Thornton Wilder

    If a man has no vices, he is in great danger of making vices about his virtues, and there's a spectacle.

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    Thornton Wilder

    If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent.

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    Thornton Wilder

    If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good

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    Thornton Wilder

    I have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps

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    Thornton Wilder

    Imprisonment of the body is bitter; imprisonment of the mind is worse

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    Thornton Wilder

    In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.

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    Thornton Wilder

    I not only bow to the inevitable; I am fortified by it.

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    Thornton Wilder

    I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.

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    Thornton Wilder

    I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.