Thornton Wilder

Pictured on a 32 US commemorative postage stamp in the Literary Arts series, issued 17 April 1997.

He is most famous for his play "Our Town", which was first produced on Broadway in 1938. It has been made into a theatrical motion picture only once (so far), in 1940, with four members of the original cast and with the plays ending completely altered, and, many would say, ruined. It has been revived on Broadway several times, the latest revival (with Paul Newman ) being produced in the fall of 2002 and broadcast on TV in 2003. Two of the plays revivals have been broadcast, but the play has been performed on television no fewer than five times since 1950. It has also been produced, and continues to be produced, by virtually every high school or college in the United States at one time or another.

Attended the MacDowell Colony in Petersborough, NH, on which he based Grovers Corner in "Our Town".

Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, Vol. 132, pp. 410-415. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005.

His works often contain derivations (some would say plagiarizations) from the novels of James Joyce.

One of Hitchcocks favorite screenwriters.

Introduced writer-director Garson Kanin to his future wife, actress-writer Ruth Gordon in 1940.

Marriage is the price men pay for sex; sex is the price women pay for,marriage.

The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.

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

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

It required all his delicate Epicurean education to prevent his doing something about it; he had to repeat over to himself his favorite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune. 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.

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

The type of the Inevitable is death. I remember well that in my youth I believed that I was certainly exempt from its operation. First when my daughter died, next when you were wounded, I knew that I was mortal; and now I regard those years as wasted, as unproductive, in which I was not aware that my death was certain, nay, momently possible. I can now appraise at a glance those who have not yet foreseen their death. I know them for the children they are. They think that by evading its contemplation they are enhancing the savor of life. The reverse is true: only those who have grasped their non-being are capable of praising the sunlight.

If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good,It was full of wounding remarks rather brilliantly said, perhaps said for the sheer virtuosity of giving pain neatly. Each of its phrases found its way through the eyes of the Marquesa, then, carefully wrapped in understanding and forgiveness, it sank into her heart.

Let us at least say of religion that it means that every part of the body is infused with mind, not that the mind is overwhelmed and drowned in body. For the principal attribute of the Gods, without or within us, is mind.

Love as education is one of the great powers of the world, but it hangs in a delicate suspension; it achieves its harmony as seldom as does love by the senses. Frustrated, it creates even greater havoc, for like all love it is a madness.

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

The central movement of the mind is the desire for unrestricted liberty and (. . . ) this movement is invariably accompanied by its opposite, a dread of the consequences of liberty.

Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.

the condition of leadership adds new degrees of solitariness to the basic solitude of mankind. Every order that we issue increases the extent to which we are alone, and every show of deference which is extended to us separates us from our fellows.

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.

She did not suspect that the Abbess was even there hovering about the house, herself estimating the stresses and watching for the moment when a burden harms and not strengthens.

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,So - people a thousand years from now. . . This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.

But while they continued staring into one another’s face waiting for the miracle of science the pain grew worse.

I have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps,It is only dogs that never bite their masters.

The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.

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.

Throughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations.

[Dona Maria] saw that the people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires.

She resembled the swallow in the fable who once every thousand years transferred a grain of wheat, in the hope of rearing a mountain to reach the moon. Such persons are raised up in every age; they obstinately insist on transporting their grains of wheat and they derive a certain exhilaration from the sneers of the bystanders. “How queerly they dress!” we cry. “How queerly they dress!,And at once he sacrificed everything to it, if it can be said we ever sacrifice anything save what we know we can never attain, or what some secret wisdom tells us it would be uncomfortable or saddening to possess.

Perhaps she would learn in time to permit both her daughter and her gods to govern their own affairs.

The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed.

There is no need for me to curse you -the murderer survives the victim only to learn that it was himself that he longed to be rid of. Hatred is self-hatred.

But such occasions of excellence became less and less frequent. As her technique became sounder, [her] sincerity became less necessary.

Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.

You swore you loved me, and laughed and warned me that you would not love me forever. I did not hear you. You were speaking in a language I did not understand. Never, never, I can conceive of a love which is able to foresee its own termination. Love is its own eternity. Love is in every moment of its being: all time. It is the only glimpse we are permitted of what eternity is. So I did not hear you. The words were nonsense.

I want you to try and remember what it was like to have been very young. And particularly the days when you were first in love; when you were like a person sleepwalking, and you didn’t quite see the street you were in, and didn’t quite hear everything that was said to you. You’re just a little bit crazy. Will you remember that, please?,[Camila] was quite incapable of establishing any harmony between the claims of her art, of her appetites, or her dreams, and of her crowded daily routine. Each of these was a world in itself.

The marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she is a householder.

I not only bow to the inevitable I am fortified by it.

The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.

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

A play visibly represents pure existing.

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

For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?,Where there is an unknowable there is a promise.

We live in what is but we find 1 000 ways not to face it. Great theatre strengthens our faculty to face it.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

The future is the most expensive luxury in the world.

Pride avarice and envy are in every home.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose. .