 |
Adventure
|
|
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.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
Animals
|
|
|
The best thing about animals is they don't talk much.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
Authors & Writing
|
|
|
The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
Books
|
|
|
Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
Children
|
|
|
The planting of trees in the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
|
Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
Choice
|
|
|
For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
Comedy
|
|
|
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.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
Conflict
|
|
|
It's when you're safe at home that you wish you were having an adventure. When you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
Conversation
|
|
|
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.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
Criticism
|
|
|
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.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
Discovery
|
|
|
There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
Goodness
|
|
|
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...
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
Gratitude
|
|
|
My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
-Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth (act I), 1942
|
|
Mankind, Man
|
|
|
Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.
-Thornton Wilder, attributed
|
|
Marriage
|
|
|
The best part of married life is the fights. The rests is merely so.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
|
Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
Military, the
|
|
|
I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
Play/Games
|
|
|
A play visibly represents pure existing.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
Poetry
|
|
|
I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.
-Thornton Wilder, attributed
|
|
Promises
|
|
|
Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
Theater
|
|
|
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.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
|
I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
|
The theatre is supremely fitted to say: Behold! These things are. Yet most dramatists employ it to say: This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.
-Thornton Wilder
|
|
|
The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen, the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.
-Thornton Wilder
|
Books by and about Thornton Wilder