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Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.
Willa Cather -
No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses.
Willa Cather
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People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.
Willa Cather -
Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.
Willa Cather -
We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it - for a little while.
Willa Cather -
Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.
Willa Cather -
Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
Willa Cather -
From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.
Willa Cather
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Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.
Willa Cather -
Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions of them.
Willa Cather -
It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
Willa Cather -
Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.
Willa Cather -
What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
Willa Cather -
I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known her about ever since I could remember anything at all.
Willa Cather
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Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together.
Willa Cather -
The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer; it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.
Willa Cather -
We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on cigar-box lids.
Willa Cather -
What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?
Willa Cather -
It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies; our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?
Willa Cather -
Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones.
Willa Cather
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Setting ... is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.
Willa Cather -
If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don't care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.
Willa Cather -
It is a tragic hour, that hour when we are finally driven to reckon with ourselves, when every avenue of mental distraction has been cut off and our own life and all its ineffaceable failures closes about us like the walls of that old torture chamber of the Inquisition.
Willa Cather -
The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
Willa Cather