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The stuff of which masterpieces are made drifts about the world waiting to be clothed in words.

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
Made
World
Drifts
Masterpieces
Clothed
Masterpiece
Waiting
Words
Stuff

More quotes by Thornton Wilder

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[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.
Thornton Wilder
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The more decisions that you are forced to make alone, the more you are aware of your freedom to choose.
Thornton Wilder
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Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
Thornton Wilder
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Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
Thornton Wilder
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The public for which masterpieces are intended is not of this earth.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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I not only bow to the inevitable I am fortified by it.
Thornton Wilder
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The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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Nature reserves the right to inflict upon her children the most terrifying jests.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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People are meant to go through life two by two. ’Tain’t natural to be lonesome.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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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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The best part of married life is the fights. The rest is merely so-so.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.
Thornton Wilder