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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.

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
Sort
Regarded
Living
Pale
Business
Cruel
Love
Required
Pass
Wrung
Youth
Malady
Late
Elect
Ready
Emerge

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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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Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
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I hold we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.
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Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
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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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I am my own judge of what truths I shall tell. The truth can do just as much harm as a lie.
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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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There's nothing like mixing with women to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.
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Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.
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One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries them.
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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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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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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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you have to love life to have life, and you need to have life to love life
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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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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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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?
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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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