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141 " As an anonymous letter has recently informed me, a dictatorship is a powerful incitement to the composition of anonymous letters. I have never known a time when so many were in circulation. They are continually arriving at my door. Inspired by passion and enjoying the irresponsibility of their orphaned condition, they nevertheless have one great advantage over legitimate correspondence: they expose their ideas to their ultimate conclusion; they empty the sack. "
― Thornton Wilder , The Ides of March
142 " She 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. These were the sons and daughters of Adam from Cathay to Peru. "
― Thornton Wilder , The Bridge of San Luis Rey
143 " Facciamo quello che possiamo. Tiriamo avanti, Esteban, come meglio possiamo. Non dura molto, sai,... Il tempo passa. Ti sorprenderà vedere come passa in fretta". "
144 " EMILY: Softly, more in wonder than in grief. I can’t bear it. They’re so young and beautiful. Why did they ever have to get old? Mama, I’m here. I’m grown up. I love you all, everything.—I can’t look at everything hard enough. "
― Thornton Wilder , Our Town
145 " We do what we can. We push on, Esteban, as best we can. It isn’t for long, you know. Time keeps going by. You’ll be surprised at the way time passes. "
146 " The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. "
― Thornton Wilder
147 " I think we’re all bad judges of what goes on in other people’s minds about God, Mr. Smith. It’s a bad thing to force a God on a man who doesn’t want one. It’s worse to stand in the way of a man who wants one badly. "
― Thornton Wilder , The Eighth Day
148 " Spiders draw just enough silk out of their bowels to catch those half-dozen flies they need to feed themselves and their loved ones; but the rich make silk and silk and silk. Nothing can stop them. Their houses are stuffed with it. Their banks are stuffed with it, and it’s not out of their bowels they make it, but out of the bowels and lungs and eyeballs of others. "
149 " Listen, you are no longer a boy. You are forty. When will you learn not to wait for chance but to build on what you have and use each day to consolidate your position? Why have you never been anything more than Tribune? Because your plans always begin with next month. "
150 " All historical novels are science fiction since they are about time travel, "
151 " Whom were these two seeking to please? Not the audiences of Lima. They had long since been satisfied. We come from a world where we have known incredible standards of [82] excellence, and we dimly remember beauties which we have not seized again; and we go back to that world. Uncle Pio and Camila Perichole were tormenting themselves in an effort to establish in Peru the standards of the theatres in some Heaven whither Calderon had preceded them. The public for which masterpieces are intended is not on this earth. "
152 " In the early summer of 1902 John Barrington "
153 " Yes, an awful lot of sorrow has sort of quietened down up here. People just wild with grief have brought their relatives up to this hill. We all know how it is... and then time... and sunny days... and rainy days... n' snow... We're all glad they're in a beautiful place and we're coming up here ourselves when our fit's over. Now there are some things we all know but we don't takem' out and look at'm very often. We all know that something is eternal. And it ain't houses and it ain't names, and it ain't earth, and ain't even the stars... everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you'd be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. "
154 " and most profoundly personal philosophical inquiry that we can undertake. It is the question that defines us as human beings. The novel begins precisely at noon on July 20, "
155 " The growing children are misshapen by those parents who were in various ways warped by the blindness, ignorance, and passions of their own parents; and one’s own errors impoverish and cripple one’s children? Such is the endless chain of the generations? "
156 " I’m awfully interested in how big things begin. You know how it is; you’re twenty-one or twenty-two and you make some decisions. . . then whissh! you’re seventy. You’ve been a lawyer for fifty years and that white-haired lady by your side has eaten over 50,000 meals with you. How do such things begin? "
157 " Dissipated men need one trustworthy friend. "
158 " You're pretty enough for all normal purposes. "
159 " The discrepancy between faith and the facts is greater than is generally assumed. "
160 " Each new child that’s born to the Antrobuses seems to them to be sufficient reason for the whole universe’s being set in motion; and each new child that dies seems to them to have been spared a whole world of sorrow, and what the end of it will be is still very much an open question. "
― Thornton Wilder , The Skin of Our Teeth