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Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

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
Orchestration
Platitudes
Literature

More quotes by 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 hold we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.
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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Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
Thornton Wilder
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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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Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
Thornton Wilder
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The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
Thornton Wilder
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Enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate.
Thornton Wilder
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The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.
Thornton Wilder
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The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
Thornton Wilder
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I not only bow to the inevitable I am fortified by it.
Thornton Wilder
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Throughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations.
Thornton Wilder
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For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?
Thornton Wilder
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When God loves a creature he wants the creature to know the highest happiness and the deepest misery ... He wants him to know all that being alive can bring. That is his best gift.... There is no happiness save in understanding the whole.
Thornton Wilder
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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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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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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.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder