Thornton Wilder Love Quotes & Sayings

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 Bridge of San Luis Rey — Nancy Herkness

I can't look at everything hard enough! — 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

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. — Thornton Wilder

In love's service, only the wounded soldier can serve. — Thornton Wilder

Even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. — Thornton Wilder

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? — Thornton Wilder

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

You have to love life to have life, and you need to have life to love life — Thornton Wilder

Love is its own eternity. — Thornton Wilder

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

I didn't marry you because you were perfect. I didn't even marry you because I loved you. I married you because you gave me a promise. That promise made up for your faults. And the promise I gave you made up for mine. Two imperfect people got married and it was the promise that made the marriage. And when our children were growing up, it wasn't a house that protected them; and it wasn't our love that protected them
it was that promise. — Thornton Wilder

He had lost that privilege of simple nature, the dissociation of love and pleasure. Pleasure was no longer as simple as eating; it was being complicated by love. Now was beginning that crazy loss of one's self, that neglect of everything but one's dramatic thoughts about the beloved, that feverish inner life all turning upon the [loved one]. — Thornton Wilder

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. — Thornton Wilder

All of us have failed. One wishes to be punished. One is willing to assume all kinds of penance, but do you know, my daughter, that in love
I scarcely dare say it
but in love our very mistakes don't seem to be able to last long? — Thornton Wilder

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

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. — Thornton Wilder

And oh, Claudia, Claudilla, ask me to do something -something that I can do. Do not ask me to forget you or to be indifferent to you. Do not ask me to have no interest in how you pass your time. But if we are separated, set me a task, something that will be a daily link with you. — Thornton Wilder

Without your wounds where would your power be? It is your melancholy that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men and women. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In Love's service, only wounded soldiers can serve. Physician, draw back. — Thornton Wilder

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

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

I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island. — 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

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

People are meant to go through life two by two. 'Tain't natural to be lonesome. — Thornton Wilder

Many who have dedicated their life to love, can tell us less about this subject than a child who lost his dog yesterday. — 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