Our Town Quotes

“Yes, now you know. Now you know! That's what it was 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.”
― Thornton Wilder, Our Town

“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.”
― Thornton Wilder, Our Town

“Everybody has a right to their own troubles.”
― Thornton Wilder, Our Town

“You've got to love life to have life, and you've got to have life to love life.”
― Thornton Wilder, Our Town

“So - people a thousand years from now...This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.”
― Thornton Wilder

“EMILY: Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?— every, every minute?

STAGE MANAGER: No.

The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.”
― Thornton Wilder, Our Town