Thornton Wilder

The bridge seemed to be among the things that last forever; it was unthinkable that it should break.

The earth sighed as it turned in its course; the shadow of night crept gradually along the Mediterranean, and Asia was left in darkness.

Servant girls returned bracelets which they had stolen from their mistresses, and usurers harangued their wives angrily, in defense of usury.

The sea was large enough to hold a varied weather: a storm played about Sicily and its smoking mountains, but at the mouth of the Nile the water lay like a wet pavement.

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

“You’ll make a greater mistake by hurrying than by delaying.”

It seemed to Brother Juniper that it was high time for theology to take its place among the exact sciences, and he had long intended putting it there.

“Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them, Simo. Magnanimity does not bargain with its powers.”

And I, who claim to know so much more, isn’t it possible that even I have missed the very spring within the spring?

Simo suddenly realized that he lived among people of thin natures and that he was lonely; he was out of practice in conversing with sovereign personalities whose every speech arose from resources of judgment and inner poise.

Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.

He had made a fool of himself, but in good hands one does not mind.

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

Later one philosophizes for praise, or for apology, or because it is a complicated intellectual game.

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

Suddenly the hero saw that the living too are dead and that we can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasure; for our hearts are not strong enough to love every moment.

All the world was remote and strange and hostile except one’s brother.

The gods heard him, but before he left he fell upon the ground and kissed the soil of the world that is too dear to be realized.

Even speech was for them a debased form of silence, how much more futile is poetry which is a debased form of speech.

The loneliest associations are those that pretend to intimacy.