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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
Effacing
Confidences
Recipients
Attentive
Silent
Quiet
Become
Self

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

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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.
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Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have discovered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calculated spontaneity are in winning what they want.
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That's the advantage of having lived sixty-five years. You don't feel the need to be impatient any longer.
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Doctors are mostly impostors. The older a doctor is and the more venerated he is, the more he must pretend to know everything. Of course, they grow worse with time. Always look for a doctor who is hated by the best doctors. Always seek out a bright young doctor before he comes down with nonsense.
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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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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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The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
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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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One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds himself almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in the arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries them.
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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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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.
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Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
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I am convinced that, except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts.
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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
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Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.
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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There's nothing like mixing with women to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.
Thornton Wilder
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Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.
Thornton Wilder
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Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
Thornton Wilder
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The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.
Thornton Wilder