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What is essential does not die but clarifies.

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
Clarifies
Essential
Essentials
Healing
Dies
Doe

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The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
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Ninety-nine percent of the people in the world are fools and the rest of us are in great danger of contagion.
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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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There's nothing like mixing with women to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.
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All that we know about those we have loved and lost is that they would wish us to remember them with a more intensified realization of their reality. What is essential does not die but clarifies. The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
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The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.
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A good writer preserves an air of freedom in his prose, so that the reader won't know how a story will end - even if he's reading a history book.
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There is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
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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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If a man has no vices, he is in great danger of making vices about his virtues, and there's a spectacle.
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Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
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Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
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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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Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
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The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.
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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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I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
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The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.
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