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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.

Thornton Wilder

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Thornton Wilder
Age: 78 †
Born: 1897
Born: April 17
Died: 1975
Died: December 7
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Madison
Wisconsin
Thornton Niven Wilder
Extraordinary
Atheism
Formation
Childhood
Exceptional
Except
Gifts
Cases
Unhappy
Another
Essential
Form
Essentials
Convinced

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I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
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I hold we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.
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Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
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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.
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Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
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If a man has no vices, he is in great danger of making vices about his virtues, and there's a spectacle.
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I not only bow to the inevitable I am fortified by it.
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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.
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What is essential does not die but clarifies.
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We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.
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The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
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Heaven's my destination.
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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.
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A purpose is the eternal condition of success.
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Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible.
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Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
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Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.
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On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.
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I have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps
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A play visibly represents pure existing.
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