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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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For what human ill does dawn not seem to be alternative?
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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.
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.
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[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.
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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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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.
Thornton Wilder
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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?
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I rose by sheer military ability to the rank of corporal.
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Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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Choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough.
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There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.
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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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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On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.
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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There is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.
Thornton Wilder
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A play visibly represents pure existing.
Thornton Wilder
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Marriage is a bribe to make a housekeeper think she's a householder.
Thornton Wilder