Thornton Wilder

“I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island.”

“There is not a single untruth, no -but after ten lines Truth shrieks, she runs distraught and disheveled through her temple's corridors; she does not know herself. 'I can endure lies,' she cries. 'I cannot survive this stifling verisimilitude”

“There's nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.”

“People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.”

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

“Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.”

“When you're safe at home you wish you were having an adventure; when you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.”

“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.”

“Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It's your combination sinners - your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards - who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute.”

“This assumption that she need look for no more devotion now that her beauty had passed proceeded from the fact that she had never realized any love save love as passion. Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties. Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.”

“The first and last schoolmaster of life is living and committing oneself unreservedly and dangerously to living; to men who know this an Aristotle and a Plato have much to say; but those who have imposed cautions on themselves and petrified themselves in a system of ideas, them the masters themselves will lead into error”

“When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift. There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.”

“Marriage is a bribe to make the housekeeper think she's a householder.”

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

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

“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.'”

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

“We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.”

“Her religious beliefs went first, for all she could ask of a god, or of immortality, was the gift of a place where daughters love their mothers; the other attributes of Heaven you could have for a song.”

“The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs.”