Thornton Wilder
Thornton Wilder
Thornton Niven Wilderwas an American playwright and novelist. He won three Pulitzer Prizes—for the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and for the two plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth — and a U.S. National Book Award for the novel The Eighth Day...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth17 April 1897
CityMadison, WI
CountryUnited States of America
act faith planting purer trees
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.
activity concerning critic critics-and-criticism enormous general governed iceberg principles selection sentence skeleton writer
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.
art theatre acting
I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.
play actors signatures
Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
theatre moral action
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.'
secret acting agents
If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent.
play actors blank
Characterization in a play is like a blank check which the dramatist accords to the actor for him to fill in.
humor judging action
A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. It pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure.
impulses land living loved memory necessary ourselves return shall
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,
employ fitted learned moral supremely theatre truth
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.''
summer boys sparrows
Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer's day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.
country travel want
Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.
bring mixing woman
There's nothing like mixing with a woman to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense
above consciousness heads human knit law less practical primitive sea shelter smoke stretched temporary thousands tiny together wondering
The tiny tealeaf of consciousness spreads its bittersweet smoke through the sea of the primitive mind. Law is invented, then morality, then love, then forgiveness. Thousands and thousands of ideas, knit together over time, each one less practical and more ornamental than the last, all stretched taut above the wandering, wondering heads like a little pavilion; a temporary shelter for the human project.