Quote: 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]
Quote: For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative? [Thornton Wilder]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: The best part of married life is the fights. The rests is merely so. [Thornton Wilder]
Quote: 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]
Quote: Literature is the orchestration of platitudes. [Thornton Wilder]
Quote: Many plays, are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them. [Thornton Wilder]
Quote: A play visibly represents pure existing. [Thornton Wilder]
Quote: It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves. [Thornton Wilder]
Quote: Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise. [Thornton Wilder]
Quote: I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal. [Thornton Wilder]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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. [Thornton Wilder]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: 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]
Quote: An incinerator is a writer's best friend. [Thornton Wilder]
Quote: But there comes a moment in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among the human beings or not - a fool among fools or a fool alone. [Thornton Wilder]
Quote: Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger. [Thornton Wilder]
Quote: For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation? [Thornton Wilder]
Quote: Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous. [Thornton Wilder]
Quote: 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]