Willa Cather Quotes
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She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends.
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Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing.
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I've seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too ful of life and love. They can't help it. Poeple come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter.
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[Mark Twain] is still the rough, awkward, good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands when he was three years old. Thoroughly likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters.
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He domesticated and developed the native wild flowers. He had one hill-side solidly clad with that low-growing purple verbena which mats over the hills of New Mexico. It was like a great violet velvet mantle thrown down in the sun; all the shades that the dyers and weavers of Italy and France strove for through centuries, the violet that is full of rose colour and is yet not lavender; the blue that becomes almost pink and then retreats again into sea-dark purple—the true Episcopal colour and countless variations of it.
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The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
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"More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.
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The land belongs to the future.
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Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.
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Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.
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Too much information is rather deadening.
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Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.
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You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?
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The two friends stood for a few moments on the windy street corner, not speaking a word, as two travelers, who have lost their way, sometimes stand and admit their perplexity in silence. (O Pioneers!)
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Thea was still under the belief that public opinion could be placated; that if you clucked often enough, the hens would mistake you for one of themselves.
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Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.
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Alexandra sighed. "I have a feeling that if you go away, you will not come back. Something will happen to one of us, or to both. People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find. What I have is yours if you care enough about me to take it.
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I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.
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How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!
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If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry