Willa Cather Quotes | Quotes by Willa Cather

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
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Winter lies too long in country towns hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
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That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.
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Where there is great love there are always miracles.
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Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
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I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
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Where there is great love, there are always wishes.
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The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him whic...
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Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of th...
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Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine.
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All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity.
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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.
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She used to drag her mattress besider her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with excitement, as a machine vibrates from speed. Life rushed in upon her through that window - or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without. There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that is was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation.
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The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
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What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
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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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Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.
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Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
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Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
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That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after his day. He did not know just when it had become so necessary t...
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There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
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Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
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Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you wha...
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If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy...
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