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Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.

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
Quiet
Become
Self
Effacing
Confidences
Recipients
Attentive
Silent

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Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
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Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
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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 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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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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Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.
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I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.
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Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
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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.
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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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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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Love is an energy which exists of itself. It is its own value.
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The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
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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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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.
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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.
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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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What is essential does not die but clarifies.
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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.
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When you're at war, you think about a better life when you're at peace you think about a more comfortable one.
Thornton Wilder