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A good writer preserves an air of freedom in his prose, so that the reader won't know how a story will end - even if he's reading a history book.

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
Book
Reader
Even
Writer
Good
Reading
Story
Freedom
History
Preserves
Ends
Prose
Stories
Air

More quotes by 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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Where there is an unknowable, there is a promise.
Thornton Wilder
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There is no drunkenness equal to that of remembering whispered words in the night.
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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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Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home.
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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.
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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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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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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A purpose is the eternal condition of success.
Thornton Wilder
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I not only bow to the inevitable I am fortified by it.
Thornton Wilder
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Hope, like faith, is nothing if it is not courageous it is nothing if it is not ridiculous.
Thornton Wilder
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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.
Thornton Wilder
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Favors cease to be favors when there are conditions attached to them.
Thornton Wilder
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Life is a fatal adventure. It can only have one end. So why not make it as far-ranging and free as possible.
Thornton Wilder
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you have to love life to have life, and you need to have life to love life
Thornton Wilder
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But there comes a time in everybody's life when he must decide whether he'll live among human beings or nota fool among fools or a fool alone.
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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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.
Thornton Wilder
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A play visibly represents pure existing.
Thornton Wilder