Quote

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

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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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Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
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Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
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Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.
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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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A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving human beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it.
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The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
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It is very necessary to have markers of beauty left in a world seemingly bent on making the most evil ugliness.
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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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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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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.
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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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I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.
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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.
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Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
Thornton Wilder
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Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
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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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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.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder