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[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.

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
Humans
Layers
Nonsense
Near
Whenever
Race
Human

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Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
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But there comes a time in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among human beings or nota fool among fools or a fool alone.
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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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The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.
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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.
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The condition of leadership adds new degrees of solitariness to the basic solitude of mankind. Every order that we issue increases the extent to which we are alone, and every show of deference which is extended to us separates us from our fellows.
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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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There's nothing like mixing with women to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.
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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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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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Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
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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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Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.
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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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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.
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I hold we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.
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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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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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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.
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There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.
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