Thornton Wilder Quotes

People want to believe that every marriage is perfect balance but it isn't. One person always loves more deeply than the other

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 theremay never be two that love one another equally well.

She loved him, more than she could ever find words for, but this love he felt for her was not quite the same. It wasn't so much stronger, as more demanding, more insistent. As though he feared he would lose that which he had finally won.

I'm sorry," I say. "I didn't give you everything you wanted. I wasn't everything you wanted. You were everything I wanted.

I loved you long before you loved me. It's the only thing I have you beat at, and I'll bring it up every chance I get.

Some cynical Frenchman has said that there are two parties to a love-transaction: the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated.

One of us had loved the other more perfectly, had watched the other more closely, and one of us listened and the other hadn’t, and one of us held on to the ambition of the one idea far longer than was reasonable, whereas the other, passing a garbage can one night, had casually thrown it away.

You can't be friends with someone who's in love with you if you don't love that person back the same way.

He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer.

I have invariably been in love when I haven't had the same reciprocated emotion at all. I don't choose to talk about my personal life because I believe that I don't want to, and I believe my personal life is personal.

Love between a man and a woman is inevitably complicated, corrupted, and obstructed by an unequal balance of power.

There's always one who loves and one who lets himself be loved.

It’s as easy as we choose to make it,” he murmured, pressing his forehead to mine. “At least, this decision is. Nothing’s truly easy, Georgina. Love and life . . . they’re wonderful, but they’re hard. We may mess up again. We have to be strong and decide if we can still go forward, even when things aren’t perfect.

When you love someone more than he loves you, you'll do anything to switch the scales. You dress the way you think he'd like you to dress. You pick up his favorite figures of expression. You tell yourself that if you re-create yourself in his image, then he'll crave you in the same way you crave him.

Most of the problem I see amongst friends and I've experienced amongst myself is when people haven't accommodated the inequality that they want, they haven't understood that their partner wants to give more love and receive less or they haven't understood that their partner wants to receive more, but sort of give less.

It hurts being the one who loves more

I think of 'crazy' as what happens when we love the other person more than we love ourselves.

If we only fell in love with people who were perfect for us...then there wouldn't be so much fuss about love in the first place.

Maybe you’re not willing to give up a lover who’s colder than you are.

Woman has nothing but her affections,--and this makes her at once more loving and less loved.

Why is it so hard to articulate love yet so easy to express disappointment?

It is the perfect wrong time for Jeremy to do to Mirabelle what she had done to him - call him up for a quick fix - because;, in a sense, she is now betrothed. Her first date with someone who treated her well obligates her to faithfulness, at least until the relationship is explored.

Life scars us with its random motion, he thought. Only death is perfect.

Odd, she thought, how intensely you knew a person, or thought you did, when you were in love - soaked, drenched in love - only to discover later that perhaps you didn't know that person quite as well as you had imagined. Or weren't quite as well known as you had hoped to be. In the beginning, a lover drank in every word and gesture and then tried to hold on to that intensity for as long as possible. But inevitable, if two people were together long enough, that intensity had to wane.

I think there couldn't be a more perfect time with the state of the world than to come together and share an experience - especially an entertainment experience like This Is Us - to say, "You're different, and I'm different, but we all agree that life should be lived. You should be happy, and we're all deserving of joy."