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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
Childhood
Exceptional
Except
Gifts
Cases
Unhappy
Another
Essential
Form
Essentials
Convinced
Extraordinary
Atheism
Formation

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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.
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Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
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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.
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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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When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery ... He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift.... There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.
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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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I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.
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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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Heaven's my destination.
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Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.
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How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you rip the fronts off houses you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?
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A dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and counter-shocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment.
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Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
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Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
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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 think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.
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I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
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A purpose is the eternal condition of success.
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the whole purport of literature...is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.
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It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.
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