Thornton Wilder - The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)

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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
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.

Thornton Wilder
On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.

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

Thornton Wilder
People were always asking for good sound proofs; doubt springs eternal in the human breast, even in countries where the Inquisition can read your very thoughts in your eyes.

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
[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.

Thornton Wilder
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.

Thornton Wilder
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.

Thornton Wilder
There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.

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

Thornton Wilder
Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.

Thornton Wilder
Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but there may never be two that love one another equally well.

Thornton Wilder
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.

Thornton Wilder
Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.

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
The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.

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

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

Thornton Wilder
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.

Thornton Wilder
Such occasions of excellence became less and less frequent. As her technique became sounder, sincerity became less necessary.

Thornton Wilder