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Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.

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
Country
Even
Life
English
Travel
Ought
Talk
Dies
Seems

More quotes by 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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People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.
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Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
Thornton Wilder
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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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Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
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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
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
Thornton Wilder
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The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
Thornton Wilder
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For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?
Thornton Wilder
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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?
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.
Thornton Wilder
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[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
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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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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A purpose is the eternal condition of success.
Thornton Wilder
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Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
Thornton Wilder