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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.

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
Less
Quarrels
Lives
Finds
Artist
Thrown
Art
Arts
Persons
Danger
Marries
Among
Exclusively
Almost
Eats
American
Dangers

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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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A play visibly represents pure existing.
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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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We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face 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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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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Every good thing in the world stands on the razor-edge of danger.
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Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
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He regarded love as a sort of cruel malady through which the elect are required to pass in their late youth and from which they emerge, pale and wrung, but ready for the business of living.
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Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
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Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
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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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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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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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[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.
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A purpose is the eternal condition of success.
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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 difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous-and can shatter the world. And the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight-and that, also, can shatter the world.
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When you're at war, you think about a better life when you're at peace you think about a more comfortable one.
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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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