Thornton Wilder - Living Quotes

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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.

Thornton Wilder
The dead don't stay interested in us living people for very long. Gradually, gradually, they let go hold of the earth... and the ambitions they had... and the pleasures they had... and the things they suffered... and the people they loved. They get weaned away from earth—that's the way I put it — weaned away.

Thornton Wilder
There are the stars — doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings out there. Just chalk... or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. Strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.

Thornton Wilder
He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.

Thornton Wilder
I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. 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 — whether it's a field, or a home, or a country.

Thornton Wilder
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.

Thornton Wilder
We ourselves shall be loved for awhile 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.

Thornton Wilder
People a thousand years from now - this is the way we were in the provinces north of New York at the beginning of the 20th century. This is the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our living and in our dying.

Thornton Wilder