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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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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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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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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Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.
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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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Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.
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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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Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.
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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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Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.
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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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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
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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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A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.
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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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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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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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What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
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The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
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Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions of them.
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person. Two people, when they love each other, grow alike in their tastes and habits and pride, but their moral natures (whatever we may mean by that canting expression) are never welded. The base one goes on being base, and the noble one noble, to the end.
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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.