The Bridge of San Luis Rey

by Thornton Wilder

those catastrophes which lawyers shockingly call the “acts of God”

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

so slow to believe that their pains were inserted into their lives for their own good.

chicha

We had chicha when we were there in 1999. mjp 5-17-2016

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

I highlighted this before. mjp 5/28/16 Happy birtbday Mel

But soon a belief in the great Perhaps

She had talked to Pepita as to an equal. Such speech is troubling and wonderful to an intelligent child

the names were not as useful to them as our names are to most of us, for no one ever succeeded in telling the boys apart.

Pleasure was no longer as simple as eating; it was being complicated by love.

With all the fortitude in the world Manuel could not prevent himself from shouting and from flinging himself about upon the bed.

there are times when it requires a high courage to speak the banal.

at least they never submitted to the boredom of a misplaced veneration.

He possessed the six attributes of the adventurer—a memory for names and faces, with the aptitude for altering his own; the gift of tongues; inexhaustible invention; secrecy; the talent for falling into conversation with strangers; and that freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt for the dozing rich he preyed upon.

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

“My cousin lives by the bridge of San Luis Rey,” says another, and a smile goes around the company, for that also means: under the sword of Damocles.

The art of biography is more difficult than is generally supposed.

But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the 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.”

mjo 6/9/2016