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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

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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
Mind
Sovereign
Faculty
Choice
Birth
Choose
Choices
Death
May

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

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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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That's the advantage of having lived sixty-five years. You don't feel the need to be impatient any longer.
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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.
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you have to love life to have life, and you need to have life to love life
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Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.
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The planting of trees is the least self-centered of all that we can do. It is a purer act of faith than the procreation of children.
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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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Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
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Imprisonment of the body is bitter imprisonment of the mind is worse
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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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There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.
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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.
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I was an old man when I was 12 and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID!
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The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.
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Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It's your combination sinners - your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards - who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute.
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Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
Thornton Wilder
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A play visibly represents pure existing.
Thornton Wilder
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The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
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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.
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The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous-and can shatter the world. And the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight-and that, also, can shatter the world.
Thornton Wilder