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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
Literature
Notation
Whole
Faintly
Heart
Contemptible
World
Recommended
Liquid
Vessel
Bitter
Style
Purport

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

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I was an old man when I was 12 and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID!
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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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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.
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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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What is essential does not die but clarifies.
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.
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The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
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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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Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
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Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.
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The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous-and can shatter the world. And the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight-and that, also, can shatter the world.
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I not only bow to the inevitable I am fortified by it.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder