Willa Cather Quotes
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Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.
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What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?
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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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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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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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[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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Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
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Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.
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If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago.
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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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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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Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.
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One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.
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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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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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Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
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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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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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The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.
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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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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.
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Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.