Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

Image
Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
Thornton Wilder
Image
On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.
Thornton Wilder
Image
A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.
Thornton Wilder
Image
I am my own judge of what truths I shall tell. The truth can do just as much harm as a lie.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Every writer is necessarily a critic - that is, each sentence is a skeleton accompanied by enormous activity of rejection and each selection is governed by general principles concerning truth, force, beauty, and so on. The critic that is in every fabulist is like the iceberg - nine-tenths of him is under water.
Thornton Wilder
Image
What is essential does not die but clarifies.
Thornton Wilder
Image
For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?
Thornton Wilder
Image
Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.
Thornton Wilder
Image
We do not choose the day of our birth nor may we choose the day of our death, yet choice is the sovereign faculty of the mind.
Thornton Wilder
Image
[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Art is not only the desire to tell one's secret it is the desire to tell it and hide it at the same time.
Thornton Wilder
Image
There is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
Thornton Wilder
Image
When you're safe at home you wish you were having an adventure when you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at home.
Thornton Wilder
Image
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.
Thornton Wilder
Image
A man looks pretty small at a wedding, George. All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder, making sure that the knot's tied in a mighty public way.
Thornton Wilder
Image
We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.
Thornton Wilder
Image
All that we know about those we have loved and lost is that they would wish us to remember them with a more intensified realization of their reality. What is essential does not die but clarifies. The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
Thornton Wilder
Image
There's nothing like mixing with women to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.
Thornton Wilder
Image
Heaven's my destination.
Thornton Wilder