Willa Cather Quotes
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One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.
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It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or if the conventional happy ending was impossible, then it must be a tragedy in which one or both should die. In real life very few of us get what we want, our tragedies don't kill us, but we go on living them year after year, carrying them with us like a scar on an old wound.
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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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Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.
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When we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord.
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Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.
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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.
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The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.
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[Some] people really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist on making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art; expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure, and distraction, and to contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less limited and less intense idealists.
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Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.
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All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.
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A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.
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What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?
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Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.
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Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
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All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.
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When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.
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They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
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Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
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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.
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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.
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Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.
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Look at my papa here; he's been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him.