Willa Cather Quotes
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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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Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.
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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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The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
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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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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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A soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.
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Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
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Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?
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Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.
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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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Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.
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Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
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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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Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions of them.
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Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.
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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
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I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!
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Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
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Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.
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The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech - it is a gift from heart to heart.
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
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If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! “A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.
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Personal hatred and family affection are not incompatible; they often flourish and grow strong together.