Willa Cather Quotes
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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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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.
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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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The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life.
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It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.
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The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself.
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Prayers said by good people are always good prayers
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Happy people do a great deal for their friends.
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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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Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.
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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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The land belongs to the future.
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The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual; those who were not have been long forgotten.
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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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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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One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.
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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.
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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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A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.
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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.