Frasi di Thornton Wilder

Origine: Il ponte di San Luis Rey, p. 26

Origine: Idi di marzo, p. 17

Origine: Idi di marzo, p. 29

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Idi di marzo, Citazioni sul libro

Idi di marzo, Citazioni sul libro

Carlo Marenghi, in prefazione
Il ponte di San Luis Rey, Citazioni sul libro

citato in Samuel Nathaniel Behrman, L'universo di Thornton Wilder, Selezione dal Reader's Digest, ottobre 1974

Origine: Idi di marzo, p. 151

Idi di marzo, Citazioni sul libro

Origine: Idi di marzo, p. 137

Origine: Idi di marzo, p. 142

Origine: Idi di marzo, p. 25

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Origine: Our Town

Origine: The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)
Contesto: 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.

"Emily Webb"
Our Town (1938)
Contesto: I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back — up the hill — to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by Grover's Corners... Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking... and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths... and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.... Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? — Every, every minute?... I'm ready to go back... I should have listened to you. That's all human beings are! Just blind people.

Origine: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The Eighth Day (1967)

Sabina
The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)

Origine: Our Town

"Simon Stimson"
Our Town (1938)
Contesto: 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.

Writers at Work interview (1958)
Contesto: I think myself as a fabulist, not a critic. I realize that every writer is necessarily a critic — that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection; and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. But, as I have just suggested, I believe that the practice of writing consists in more and more relegating all that schematic operation to the subconscious. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg — nine-tenths of him is underwater.

"Emily Webb"
Our Town (1938)
Contesto: I can't. I can't go on. It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back — up the hill — to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by Grover's Corners... Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking... and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths... and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.... Do human beings ever realize life while they live it? — Every, every minute?... I'm ready to go back... I should have listened to you. That's all human beings are! Just blind people.

The Eighth Day (1967)
Contesto: When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery … He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift…. There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.

Origine: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Origine: Our Town

Origine: Our Town

"Mrs. Gibbs"
Origine: Our Town (1938)

Sabina, Act One
The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)

Origine: The Matchmaker

Origine: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Dolly Levi, in Act 4 http://books.google.com/books?id=MAEJ8VP0rMYC&q=%22Money+is+like+manure+it's+not+worth+a+thing+unless+it's+spread+around+encouraging+young+things+to+grow%22&pg=PA110#v=onepage
Origine: The Matchmaker (1954)

Origine: Our Town

"Stage Manager"
Origine: Our Town (1938)

Origine: Our Town

Malachi, in Act 3
The Matchmaker (1954)

As quoted in "The Notation of the Heart" by Edmund Fuller, in The American Scholar Reader (1960) edited by Hiram Hayden and Betsy Saunders

Writers at Work interview (1958)

"Mr. Webb"
Our Town (1938)