from Emily's soliloquy in "Our Town," by Thornton Wilder

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. All that was going on in life,
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-bye 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 any human beings ever realize life
while they live it? – every, every minute?

+ Thornton Wilder

This soliloquy — one of the most indelible in American letters — takes place near the end of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” Emily Webb has died, and the Stage Manager has accompanied her as she revisits her family (though they can’t see her) in an earlier time, fourteen years prior. For Emily, from this vantage point, the poignancy, the vibrancy, the beauty of this ordinary day is overwhelming. And so, Wilder suggests, is the ordinary day we’re sitting in right now, if we have eyes to see.

“Our Town” won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1938.