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I have inherited this burden of superstition and nonsense. I govern innumerable men but must acknowledge that I am governed by birds and thunderclaps

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
Must
Governed
Men
Govern
Superstitions
Birds
Nonsense
Acknowledge
Innumerable
Burden
Inherited
Bird
Superstition

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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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Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
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Imprisonment of the body is bitter imprisonment of the mind is worse
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How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you rip the fronts off houses you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?
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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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People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.
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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.
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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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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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The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.
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Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.
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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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When you're safe at home you wish you were having an adventure when you're having an adventure you wish you were safe at 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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The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.
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[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.
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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 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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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.
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