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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?

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
House
Swine
Happens
Rip
Doe
Foul
Find
Houses
Matter
Fronts
Like
Hell
World
Doubt
Hate

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Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
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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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you have to love life to have life, and you need to have life to love life
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Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.
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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 hold we cannot be said to be aware of our minds save under responsibility.
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The test of an adventure is that when you're in the middle of it, you say to yourself Oh now I've got myself into an awful mess I wish I were sitting quietly at home. And the sign that something's wrong with you is when you sit quietly at home wishing you were out having lots of adventure.
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Leadership is for those who love the public good and are endowed and trained to administer it.
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I was an old man when I was 12 and now I am an old man, AND IT'S SPLENDID!
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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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Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
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What is essential does not die but clarifies.
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[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.
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For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?
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The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.
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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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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.
Thornton Wilder
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Throughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations.
Thornton Wilder
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Heaven's my destination.
Thornton Wilder