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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
Appear
Guileless
Winning
Delicately
Children
Calculated
Spontaneity
Modesty
Charm
Effective
Discovered

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I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
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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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Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it -- every, every minute?
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I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms.
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Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.
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The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.
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A dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and counter-shocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment.
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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 am my own judge of what truths I shall tell. The truth can do just as much harm as a lie.
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People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.
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Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.
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A good writer preserves an air of freedom in his prose, so that the reader won't know how a story will end - even if he's reading a history book.
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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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Many plays - certainly mine - are like blank checks. The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
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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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What is essential does not die but clarifies.
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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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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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Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
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There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.
Thornton Wilder