"The , it's called—written and spoken with capital letters. So remote, it is almost a nation unto itself. On maps, it is labeled the , a blade of land thrusting north by northeast into the frigid waters of . Running lengthwise down the peninsula's center, like the blood gutter of a bayonet, are the richest s on earth. collected chunks of the red metal from streams and shallow pits: float copper so pure it hardly needed refining at all, so beautiful and malleable that it could be made into that were traded as far south as Arkansas."

"Many plays — certainly mine — are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them."

"I would love to be the poet laureate of Coney Island."

"Literature is the orchestration of platitudes."

"I hold that we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility."

"We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures."

"(What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?) When I was in college I witnessed a tragic death, and my father sent me Thornton Wilder’s “The Bridge of San Luis Rey” — a book about a Franciscan friar in Peru who sees a rope bridge collapse, killing five people, and then tries to learn about their lives. Wilder was so great at making sense of life and death, and that book healed me. It’s a shame that we only tend to remember Wilder for the most sentimental parts of his most sentimental play."

"My idea of a dream man was Thornton Wilder"

"Imagination draws on memory. Memory and imagination combined can stage a Servants' Ball or even write a book, if that's what they want to do."

"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."

"The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children."

"Man is not an end but a beginning. We are at the beginning of the second week. We are children of the eighth day."

"We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind."

"A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference and a longer view and finds them incongruous. It dampens enthusiasm; it mocks hope; it pardons shortcomings; it consoles failure. It recommends moderation."

"Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous; it is nothing if it is not ridiculous."

"Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences."

"It is only in appearance that time is a river. It is rather a vast landscape and it is the eye of the beholder that moves."

"One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries them."

"I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts."

"The theatre is supremely fitted to say: "Behold! These things are." Yet most dramatists employ it to say: "This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.""

"A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it."

"Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech."

"On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being; the words are rising to their lips in immediate spontaneity … The theater is supremely fitted to say: "Behold! These things are.""

"Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want."

"The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyze, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are outgrowing, or trying to reshape."

"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."

"The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way."

"Ninety-nine per cent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion."

"The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous...and the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight."

"Money is like manure; it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow."

"The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself, "Oh, now I've got myself into an awful mess; I wish I were sitting quietly at home." And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure."

"Nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around it. Then you'll have the miser who's no liar; and the drunkard who's the benefactor of the whole city."

"Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It's your combination sinners — your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards — who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute."

"Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder."

"I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for — whether it's a field, or a home, or a country."

"I hate this play and every word in it."

"My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate — that's my philosophy."

"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."

"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."

"Wherever you come near the human race there's layers and layers of nonsense."

"A man looks pretty small at a wedding, George. All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder, making sure that the knot's tied in a mighty public way."

"People are meant to go through life two by two. 'Tain't natural to be lonesome."

"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."

"Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world."

"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."

"Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes!) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy."

"The most valuable thing I inherited was a temperament that does not revolt against Necessity and that is constantly renewed in Hope."

"I am not interested in the ephemeral — such subjects as the adulteries of dentists. I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat and repeat in the lives of the millions."

"Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday."

"Love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it gives 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."