The Bridge of San Luis Rey

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

— 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

“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

“We ourselves shall be loved for awhile 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.””

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

“[Dona Maria] 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.””

— Thornton Wilder

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

— Thornton Wilder

“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

“Throughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations.””

— Thornton Wilder