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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
Nonsense
Near
Whenever
Race
Human
Humans
Layers

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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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Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
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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.
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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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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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We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.
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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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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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I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
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Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
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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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Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
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There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.
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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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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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Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
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A good writer preserves an air of freedom in his prose, so that the reader won't know how a story will end - even if he's reading a history book.
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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.
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Heaven's my destination.
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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.
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