Our Town By Thornton Wilder Quotes & Sayings

The unfortunate, yet truly exciting thing about your life, is that there is no core curriculum. The entire place is an elective. — Jon Stewart

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 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. — 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

Everybody has a right to their own troubles. — Thornton Wilder

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 — Thornton Wilder

Early in my career, having many visible tattoos created obstacles and presented quite a challenge to move forward. I've heard comments like, 'actors don't have tattoos.' The notion of typecasting was a reoccurring theme despite my passion toward creativity and personal expression. — Robert LaSardo

A human being, any human being at all, has so perishingly few chances to stay right there, to let go of time and fall into the moment. And to love someone without measure, explode with passion ... A few times when we are children, maybe, for those of us who are allowed to be ... But after that? How many breaths are we allowed to take beyond the confines of ourselves? How many pure emotions make us cheer out loud without a sense of shame? How many chances do we get to be blessed by amnesia? All passion is childish, it's banal and naive, it's nothing we learn, it's instinctive, and so it overwhelms us ... Overturns us ... It bears us away in a flood ... All other emotions belong to the earth, but passion inhabits the universe. That is the reason why passion is worth something. Not for what it gives us, but for what it demands that we risk - our dignity, the puzzlement of others in their condescending shaking heads ... — Fredrik Backman

The Republicans have a high Beady-Eyed Self-Righteous Scary Borderline Loon Quotient, as evidenced by Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Robertson, the entire state of Utah, etc. — Dave Barry

What Mr. Kaufman and his team are after is less a portrait of any one person than one of the ethos of a place. In the deliberate, simple staging ... in which eight radiantly clean-scrubbed performers embody 60 different people against a bare-bones set, 'Laramie' often brings to mind 'Our Town,' the beloved Thornton Wilder study of life, love and death in parochial New Hampshire. — Ben Brantley

Don't look at your circumstance. Be courageous! — Lailah Gifty Akita

The mind for truth
Begins, like a stream, shallow
At first, but then
Adds more and more depth
While gaining greater clarity. — Saigyo

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. — Thornton Wilder

My major contribution to the format was to suggest that I be able to step out of the plot and speak directly to the audience, and then be able to go right back into the action. That was an original idea of mine; I know it was because I originally stole it from Thornton Wilder's play Our Town. — George Burns

You've got to love life to have life, and you've got to have life to love life. — Thornton Wilder

all the sacristies in town: they trimmed all the cloister hedges; they polished every possible crucifix; they — Thornton Wilder

Getting carried away is stupid, it won't get me anywhere.
-Nana Komatsu — Ai Yazawa

The message of Christmas is not that we can make peace. Or that we can make love, make light, make gifts, or make this world save itself. The message of Christmas is that this world's a mess and we can never save ourselves from ourselves and we need a Messiah. — Ann Voskamp