Willa Cather Quotes
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William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.
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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
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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.
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I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.
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I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known her about ever since I could remember anything at all.
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A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.
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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
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The summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact of the world.
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I suppose there were moonless nights and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, but I remember them all as flooded with the rich indolence of a full moon.
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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.
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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.
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People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.
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Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
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People always think the bread of another country is better than their own.
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Oh, this is the joy of the rose; That it blows, And goes.
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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.
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Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.
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Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is.
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The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern.
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The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
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What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?
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The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.
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No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses.
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The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.