Thornton Wilder Quotes

Life is a God-damned, stinking, treacherous game and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand are bastards.

It came to Mr. Blood, as he trudged forward under the laden apple-trees on that fragrant, delicious July morning, that man—as he had long suspected—was the vilest work of God, and that only a fool would set himself up as a healer of a species that was best exterminated.

I think you can get to a point where nihilism, if that's the right word, is overwhelming, and the basic laws that society has set up - either religious or social laws - become meaningless.

If one truly has lost hope, one would not be on hand to say so.

If I owned Marseilles and Hell, I'd rent out Marseilles and live in Hell.

The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible.

O witches, O misery, O hate, to you has my treasure been entrusted! I contrived to purge my mind of all human hope. On all joy, to strangle it, I pounced with the strength of a wild beast. I called to the plagues to smother me in blood, in sand, misfortune was my God.

It is good to be a cynic - it is better to be a contented cat - and it is best not to exist at all.

It is best not to have been born at all: but, if born, as quickly as possible to return whence one came.

Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.

Viewed from the summit of reason, all life looks like a malignant disease and the world like a madhouse.

Hell ain't half full.

Her last conscious thought was disgust at life; her senses had lied to her. The world was not made of energy and delight but of foulness, betrayal, and lassitude. Living was hateful, and death was no better, and from end to end of the universe this was the first and last and only truth.

Life is a hideous thing.

You can feel nothing but a torment, and believe nothing but a lie. You will not raise your head to look at all the miracles of life that surround you; but you will run ten miles to see a fight or a death.

Whoever sincerely believes that elevated and distant goals are as little use to man as a cow, that "all of our problems" come fromsuch goals, is left to eat, drink, sleep, or, when he gets sick of that, to run up to a chest and smash his forehead on its corner.

The essential is never to arrive anywhere, never to be anywhere. The essential is to go on squirming forever at the edge of the line, as long as there are waters and banks and ravening in heaven a sporting God to plague his creature, per pro his chosen shits. I've swallowed three hooks and am still hungry. Hence the howls. What a joy to know where one is, and where one will stay, without being there. Nothing to do but strech out comfortably on the rack, in the blissful knowledge you are nobody for eternity.

The older books were quite light-hearted. But I think most of my novels do end on a deep note of pessimism. Shadows seem to be closing in. The final conclusion isn't that life is wonderful and everything is bright and cheery and in the garden.

I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals.

I do suspect that this world is hell.

Sometimes, I can myself be frustrated by books that seem to me to be insufficiently realistic about the world's potential for just being totally a randomly bad place.

Life is absolutely horrific, leading up to absolute horror.

Hell has been described as a pocket edition of Chicago.

I do get cynical, but what can you do? It doesn't make any difference.

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.