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The land belongs to the future.
Willa Cather -
Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.
Willa Cather
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"More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.
Willa Cather -
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.
Willa Cather -
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.
Willa Cather -
The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world.
Willa Cather -
Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.
Willa Cather -
Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.
Willa Cather
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Too much information is rather deadening.
Willa Cather -
The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
Willa Cather -
Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.
Willa Cather -
Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.
Willa Cather -
In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance; from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities.
Willa Cather -
How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!
Willa Cather
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But she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions. It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.
Willa Cather -
For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.
Willa Cather -
There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back.
Willa Cather -
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.
Willa Cather -
If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry
Willa Cather -
Prayers said by good people are always good prayers
Willa Cather
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One realizes that 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. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works.
Willa Cather -
Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
Willa Cather -
You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?
Willa Cather -
A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.
Willa Cather