It is the last sentence of The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wilder’s second novel, first published in 1927 by Albert & Charles Boni — the closing words of Part Five, “Perhaps an Intention.” Confirmed in the full text of a Charles Boni printing of the 1927 edition; note that the printed line runs “…a land of the dead and the bridge is love…” with no comma after “dead.”
“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning” Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Albert & Charles Boni, 1927), closing line of Part Five. Note: the printed text has no comma after "dead." Via Quotle.info
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Provenance
The closing lines of the novel
Work
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
First published
1927 · Albert & Charles Boni, New York
Location
Part Five, “Perhaps an Intention” — the novel’s final sentence
Spoken by
Madre María del Pilar, the Abbess — an unspoken thought, not narration
“Even now,” she thought, “almost no one remembers Esteban and Pepita, but myself. Camila alone remembers her Uncle Pio and her son; this woman, her mother. 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.”
Part Five, “Perhaps an Intention”
The whole paragraph passes through the Abbess’s mind while she is speaking to two grieving women in her hospital. The final sentence is the last line of the book.
Wikiquote’s Thornton Wilder page ↗ carries the sentence in its list of quotations sourced to The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) — it is not flagged as disputed or misattributed.
The full text of a Charles Boni printing digitised by the Internet Archive ↗ carries the copyright line “THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY, COPYRIGHT, 1927 ALBERT & CHARLES BONI, INC.” and ends Part Five with the sentence exactly as quoted.
The NEA Big Read guide to the novel ↗ records that British Prime Minister Tony Blair read from the book’s closing lines at a memorial service for British victims of the World Trade Center attack after 11 September 2001.
✓Public domain
The Bridge of San Luis Rey was first published in 1927 by Albert & Charles Boni, and the copyright page of the scanned Boni printing reads “COPYRIGHT, 1927.” Works published in the United States before 1931 are in the public domain there, so this passage may be quoted and reproduced freely.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
The name is right — the label around it usually isn’t
This is one of the rare famous lines that survives checking intact. What goes wrong is everything bolted on around it: which book, whose voice, and one stray comma.
✕
Wrong workOur Town book mix-up
Wilder’s best-known title pulls the line towards itself. A-Z Quotes lists the sentence on its “Our Town” topic page ↗; its own source note credits The Bridge of San Luis Rey but dates it to a 1962 Limited Editions Club printing rather than the 1927 first edition.
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Wrong voiceThornton Wilder, speaking for himself character, not author
It is a line of fiction, not an authorial maxim. The Thornton Wilder Society ↗ presents the paragraph as the Abbess’s closing reflection, and Wikipedia ↗ names her Madre María del Pilar.
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Wrong punctuationthe comma version drift
Most circulating copies insert a comma after “dead.” The scanned Boni text ↗ has none, and neither do Wikiquote, the Wilder Society or the NEA guide. A small thing — but it is the tell that a copy has passed through a quote site rather than a book.
✓The sentence is genuine and verbatim — it is the last line of The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), thought rather than spoken, by the Abbess. See Wikiquote’s sourced list ↗.
Context
Why the line lands where it does
The novel opens on a disaster and spends itself trying to justify one. “On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below,” it begins — and a Franciscan, Brother Juniper, sets out to prove by investigation that the five deaths were designed rather than random. Wilder titles his first part “Perhaps an Accident” and his last “Perhaps an Intention,” and never quite closes the gap between them.
What he offers instead is this sentence, which arrives without argument in the mind of a woman who has buried people and gone on working. That is why it reads as consolation rather than doctrine: it is not the answer Brother Juniper was hunting, it is what is left standing when the hunt fails. The novel took the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel ↗, the first of Wilder’s three Pulitzers.
Even memory is not necessary for love.
The line’s afterlife at memorials
The NEA Big Read guide ↗ notes that Tony Blair read from the closing lines at a memorial service for British victims of the World Trade Center attack in the wake of 11 September 2001 — which is where a great many people first met the sentence, detached from the book that ends with it.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Thornton Niven Wilder (17 April 1897 – 7 December 1975) was an American novelist and playwright, and the only writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for both fiction and drama. The Bridge of San Luis Rey took the 1928 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel; Our Town (1938) and The Skin of Our Teeth (1943) each took the prize for drama. His recurring subject is ordinary life looked at from the far side of death — which is exactly the vantage this sentence speaks from.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (New York: Albert & Charles Boni, 1927), closing lines of Part Five, “Perhaps an Intention.” Verified against the Charles Boni printing of the 1927 text digitised by the Internet Archive.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning’?” Last verified 8 Sep 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/there-is-a-land-of-the-living-and-a-land-of-the-dead-and/