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It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live; and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac's own estimate, one has lived in vain.
Willa Cather -
Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is.
Willa Cather
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The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.
Willa Cather -
All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.
Willa Cather -
One afternoon late in October of the year 1697, Euclide Auclair, the philosopher apothecary of Quebec, stood on the top of Cap Diamant gazing down the broad, empty river far beneath him.
Willa Cather -
The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.
Willa Cather -
People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.
Willa Cather -
There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.
Willa Cather
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There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
Willa Cather -
Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
Willa Cather -
In New Mexico, he always awoke a young man, not until he arose and began to shave did he realize that he was growing older. His first consciousness was a sense of the light dry wind blowing in through the windows, with the fragrance of hot sun and sage-brush and sweet clover; a wind that made one's body feel light and one's heart cry 'To-day, to-day,' like a child's.
Willa Cather -
The summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact of the world.
Willa Cather -
Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
Willa Cather -
The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.
Willa Cather
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After all, the supreme virtue in all art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives art a right to be.
Willa Cather -
A burnt dog dreads the fire.
Willa Cather -
Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
Willa Cather -
Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.
Willa Cather -
In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.
Willa Cather -
Sometimes," I ventured, "it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her.
Willa Cather
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The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant on one's back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky.
Willa Cather -
Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
Willa Cather -
Some people's lives are affected by what happens to their person or their property; but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts -- that and nothing more.
Willa Cather -
Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.
Willa Cather