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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.

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
Winning
Delicately
Children
Calculated
Spontaneity
Modesty
Charm
Effective
Discovered
Appear
Guileless

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Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
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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 best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.
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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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Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
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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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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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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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Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
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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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There is one regard in which bullies show real perception when compared with their victims it is their silent good-natured pleasure of the moment.
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A purpose is the eternal condition of success.
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Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
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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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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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The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.
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Imprisonment of the body is bitter imprisonment of the mind is worse
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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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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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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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