Willa Cather Quotes
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The end is nothing; the road is all.
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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. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.
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It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live; and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac's own estimate, one has lived in vain.
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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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Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand - a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods - or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.
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There was a new kind of strength in the gravity of her face, and her colors still gave her that look of deep-seated health and ardor.
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Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.
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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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Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.
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The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer; it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.
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She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends.
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Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
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Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.
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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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The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.
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If youth did not matter so much to itself, it would never have the heart to go on.
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Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
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The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity.
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This is reality, whether you like it or not--all those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.
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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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In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.
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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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Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.
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The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.
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life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
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A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.
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The land belongs to the future.
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The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
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People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.
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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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