The Bridge of San Luis Rey

by Thornton Wilder

People wandered about in a trance-like state, muttering; they had the hallucination of seeing themselves falling into a gulf.

By a series of coincidences so extraordinary that one almost suspects the presence of some Intention,

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

that it was high time for theology to take its place among the exact sciences and he had long intended putting it there.

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

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

authors live always in the noble weather of their own minds and those productions which seem remarkable to us are little better than a day’s routine to them.

The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs. Her religious beliefs went first, for all she could ask of a god, or of immortality, was the gift of a place where daughters love their mothers; the other attributes of Heaven you could have for a song. Next she lost her belief in the sincerity of those about her. She secretly refused to believe that anyone (herself excepted) loved anyone.

She longed to free herself from this ignoble bond; but the passion was too fierce to cope with. And then on that green balcony a strange warfare would shake the hideous old lady, a singularly futile struggle against a temptation to which she would never have the opportunity of succumbing.

drift through the next few weeks without the burden of consciousness.

She was one of those persons who have allowed their lives to be gnawed away because they have fallen in love with an idea several centuries before its appointed appearance in the history of civilization.

the women in Peru, even her nuns, went through life with two notions: one, that all the misfortunes that might befall them were merely due to the fact that they were not sufficiently attractive to bind some man to their maintenance and, two, that all the misery in the world was worth his caress.

She resembled the swallow in the fable who once every thousand years transferred a grain of wheat, in the hope of rearing a mountain to reach the moon. Such persons are raised up in every age; they obstinately insist on transporting their grains of wheat and they derive a certain exhilaration from the sneers of the bystanders. “How queerly they dress!” we cry. “How queerly they dress!”

Her plain red face had great kindliness, and more idealism than kindliness, and more generalship than idealism.

counted the cessation of her visits among the compensations for dying.

She never had been taught to expect happiness, and the inconveniences, not to say terrors, of her new position did not seem to her excessive

she would withdraw into herself again and, while never harsh, would become impersonal and unseeing.

a revulsion would sweep over her. Nature is deaf. God is indifferent. Nothing in man’s power can alter the course of law. Then on some street-corner she would stop, dizzy with despair, and leaning against a wall would long to be taken from a world that had no plan in it. But soon a belief in the great Perhaps would surge up from the depths of her nature

Santa María de Cluxambuqua. If there resided any efficacy in devotion at all, surely it lay in a visit to this great shrine. The ground had been holy through three religions; even before the Incan civilization distraught human beings had hugged the rocks and lashed themselves with whips to wring their will from the skies.

Perhaps she would learn in time to permit both her daughter and her gods to govern their own affairs.

Pepita was frightened by her sense of insufficiency; she hid it and wept.

She remembered the long relationship, crowded with the wreckage of exhumed conversations, of fancied slights, of inopportune confidences, of charges of neglect and exclusion (but she must have been mad that day; she remembered beating upon the table). “But it’s not my fault,” she cried. “It’s not my fault that I was so. It was circumstance. It was the way I was brought up.

its immortal paragraph about love: “Of the thousands of persons we meet in a lifetime, my child ...”

the Cid and Judas Maccabeus and the thirty-six misfortunes of Harlequin.

He had lost that privilege of simple nature, the dissociation of love and pleasure.

He emptied his mind of everything but a singsong,

(For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?)

“We do what we can. We push on, Esteban, as best we can. It isn’t for long, you know. Time keeps going by. You’ll be surprised at the way time passes.”

however, he is so moth-eaten by disease and bad company, that I shall have to leave him to his underworld.

But there arose out of this denial itself the perfume of a tenderness, that ghost of passion which, in the most unexpected relationship, can make even a whole lifetime devoted to irksome duty pass like a gracious dream.

Whom were these two seeking to please? Not the audiences of Lima. They had long since been satisfied. We come from a world where we have known incredible standards of excellence, and we dimly remember beauties which we have not seized again; and we go back to that world.

The public for which masterpieces are intended is not on this earth.

quite incapable of establishing any harmony between the claims of her art, of her appetites, of her dreams, and of her crowded daily routine.

but the distress of remorse was less poignant than the distress of fasting

He had read all the literature of antiquity and forgotten all about it except a general aroma of charm and disillusion.

They talked about ghosts and second-sight, and about the earth before man appeared upon it and about the possibility of the planets striking against one another; about whether the soul can be seen, like a dove, fluttering away at the moment of death; they wondered whether at the second coming of Christ to Jerusalem, Peru would be long in receiving the news.

He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.

There was nothing left for her to do but to draw out her days in jealous solitude in the center of the little farm that was falling into decay. She brooded for hours upon the joy of her enemies and could be heard striding about her room with strange cries.

The air was cool and agreeable. The first faint streak of sapphire was appearing behind the peaks and in the east the star of morning was pulsating every moment with a more tender intention. A profound silence wrapped all the farm buildings, only an occasional breeze set all the grasses sighing.

The discrepancy between faith and the facts is greater than is generally assumed.

“I fail everybody,” she cried. “They love me and I fail them.”

murmured over with joy) could spring in the heart of Pepita’s mistress. “Now learn,” she commanded herself, “learn at last that anywhere you may expect grace.” And she was filled with happiness like a girl at this new proof that the traits she lived for were everywhere, that the world was ready. “Will you do me a kindness, my daughter? Will you let me show you my work?”