Thornton Wilder Quotes

“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

“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

“The great law of art is uniformity of tone; since it cannot record all experience, its fidelity to its chosen fragment of experience implies its consciousness of all experience as a similar though more variegated uniformity of tone. (To intrude into a work an unrelated tone is to imply that one is incorporating the ‘all,’ a presumption that speaks volumes on the author’s inability to grasp experience’s multiplicity.) Here lies the greatness of Jane Austen: her perfection in the small implies her comprehension of the large.”
― Thornton Wilder, The Journals of Thornton Wilder, 1939-1961

“¿Y qué queda cuando la memoria desaparece?”
― Thornton Wilder

“She was one of those persons who have allowed their lives to be gnawed away because they have fallen in love with an idea several centuries before its appointed appearance in the history of civilization.”
― Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

“For what she had lost of religion as faith, she had replaced with religion as magic.”
― Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey