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Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.

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
Right
Children
Jests
Inflict
Terrifying
Reserves
Scary
Upon
Nature

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

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Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.
Thornton Wilder
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Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
Thornton Wilder
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Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it -- every, every minute?
Thornton Wilder
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Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other. There may be two equally good, equally gifted, equally beautiful, but theremay never be two that love one another equally well.
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There is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
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Money is like manure it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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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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Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer's day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.
Thornton Wilder
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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
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The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
Thornton Wilder
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Imprisonment of the body is bitter imprisonment of the mind is worse
Thornton Wilder
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The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself Oh now I've got myself into an awful mess I wish I were sitting quietly at home. And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. It pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure.
Thornton Wilder
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Throughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
Thornton Wilder
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I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
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.
Thornton Wilder