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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.

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
Finest
Travelers
Bridges
Gulf
Twentieth
Broke
Noon
Five
July
Chance
Traveler
Friday
Precipitated
Bridge
Peru

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I've never forgotten for long at a time that living is struggle. I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for - whether it's a field, or a home, or a country.
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The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
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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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The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.
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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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Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer's day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.
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I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
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Imprisonment of the body is bitter imprisonment of the mind is worse
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Never support two weaknesses at the same time. It's your combination sinners - your lecherous liars and your miserly drunkards - who dishonor the vices and bring them into bad repute.
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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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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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A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. It pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure.
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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
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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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