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
cloud existence feelings ignorance mercy million move passion spend time waste
Yes. Now you know. Now you know. 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 if 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.
time artist years
A living is made, Mr Kemper, by selling something that everybody needs at least once a year.Yes, sir! And a million ismade by producing something that everybody needs every day.You artists produce something that nobody needs at any time.
time moving passion
That’s what it was like 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, OUR TOWN
time fool humans
But there comes a time in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among human beings or nota fool among fools or a fool alone.
time moving eye
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.
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.
human layers near race wherever
Wherever you come near the human race there's layers and layers of nonsense.
american-novelist cent danger fools great people per rest
Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
blank directors
Many plays-certainly mine-are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.