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

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Money is like manure it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around encouraging young things to grow.
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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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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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People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.
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The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
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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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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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[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.
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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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If a man has no vices, he is in great danger of making vices about his virtues, and there's a spectacle.
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Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
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I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
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For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?
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Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.
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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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Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.
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I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.
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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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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.
Thornton Wilder