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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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Thornton Wilder
Age: 78 †
Born: 1897
Born: April 17
Died: 1975
Died: December 7
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Madison
Wisconsin
Thornton Niven Wilder
World
Recommended
Liquid
Vessel
Bitter
Style
Purport
Literature
Notation
Whole
Faintly
Heart
Contemptible

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

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Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.
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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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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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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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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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A man looks pretty small at a wedding, George. All those good women standing shoulder to shoulder, making sure that the knot's tied in a mighty public way.
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Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
Thornton Wilder
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Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.
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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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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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The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.
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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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Money is like manure it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.
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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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There is one regard in which bullies show real perception when compared with their victims it is their silent good-natured pleasure of the moment.
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Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
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
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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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Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Thornton Wilder
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Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
Thornton Wilder