Willa Cather Quotes
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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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What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
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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.
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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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If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don't care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.
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Sometimes falling in love may look like pure madness to those not experiencing it but that's only because they're not involved. Just because other people don't understand your feelings doesn't mean they're not real or they're not important. You have to trust yourself. Feel what you feel and don't worry about anyone else. Love is about you and your significant other, remember that.
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We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on cigar-box lids.
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One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.
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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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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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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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Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar.
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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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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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Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.
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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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Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.
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What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?
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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.
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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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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
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Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
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Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.