Thornton Niven Wilder (17 April 1897 - 7 December 1975) American writer and playwright

Sourced

• Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes!) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.
  • The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)

• Soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.
  • The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)

• A man looks pretty small at a wedding, George. All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder, making sure that the knot's knot's tied in a mighty public way.
  • Our Town (1938)

• 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.
  • "Simon Stimson" in Our Town (1938)

• I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back— up the hill— to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by Grover's Corners...Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking...and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths...and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. ...Do human beings ever realize life while they live it?— Every, every minute? ...I'm ready to go back...I should have listened to you. That's all human beings are! Just blind people.
  • "Emily Webb" in Our Town (1938)

• My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate— that's my philosophy.
  • The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)

• Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.
  • * The Matchmaker (1954) the inspiration for the musical Hello, Dolly

• Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
  • The Matchmaker (1954)

• The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.
  • The Eighth Day (1967)

• A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. . . and finds them incongruous. It dampens enthusiasm; it mocks hope; it pardons shortcomings; it consoles failure. It recommends moderation.
  • The Eighth Day (1967)

• I think myself as a fabulist, not a critic. I realize that every writer is necessary 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. But, as I have just suggested, I believe that the practice of writing consists in more and more relegating all that schematic operation to the subconscious. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg— nine-tenths of him is underwater.
• Playwrights at Work (2000) ed. by George Plimpton

Attributed

• 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.

• An incinerator is a writer's best friend.

• For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?

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

• I am not interested in the ephemeral— such subjects as the adulteries of dentists. I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat and repeat in the lives of the millions.

• 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.

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

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

• In advertising, not to be different is virtual suicide.

• It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves.

• It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.

• Life is an unbroken succession of false situations.

• Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

• Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.

• Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day.

• Many plays-certainly mine-are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.

• Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.

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

• Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.

• 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.

• Nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring p modestly around it. Then you'll have the miser who's no liar; and the drunkard who's the benefactor of the whole city.

• On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being; the words are rising to their lips in immediate spontaneity The theater is supremely fitted to say: "Behold! These things are."

• Providence has nothing good or high in store for one who does not resolutely aim at something high or good. A purpose is the eternal condition of success.

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

• We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind.

• 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.

• Where there is an unknowable there is a promise.

• Wherever you come near the human race there's layers and layers of nonsense.

External links

• Brief bio at Kirjasto (Pegasos)
• The Thornton Wilder Society
• Thornton Wilder at the Internet Movie Database