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On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.
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Where there is great love there are always miracles.
Willa Cather
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A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.
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life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
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Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.
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If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.
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When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.
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The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
Willa Cather
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One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days.
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Ugly accidents happen . . . always have and always will. But the failures are swept back into the pile and forgotten. They don`t leave any lasting scar in the world, and they don`t affect the future. The things that last are the good things. The people who forge ahead and do something, they really count.
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Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.
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Art, it seems to me, should simplify.
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The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.
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There is a popular superstition that "realism" asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. But is not realism, more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer toward his material, a vague indication of the sympathy and candour with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme?
Willa Cather
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Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
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People always think the bread of another country is better than their own.
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I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
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Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.
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When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all.Willa Cather
Willa Cather -
This is reality, whether you like it or not--all those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.
Willa Cather
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Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world
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Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
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It is cremated youth. It is all yours--no one gave it to you.
Willa Cather -
Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.
Willa Cather