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There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

Willa Cather

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Willa Cather
Age: 73 †
Born: 1873
Born: December 7
Died: 1947
Died: April 24
Author
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Willa Sibert Cather
Life
Wise
Happened
Three
Two
Niece
Stories
Fiercely
Human
Repeating
Humans
Courtesy
Never
Apology

More quotes by Willa Cather

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Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man of taste who does not very often get to Boston.
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A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.
Willa Cather
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The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.
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I suppose there were moonless nights and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, but I remember them all as flooded with the rich indolence of a full moon.
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The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant on one's back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky.
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Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.
Willa Cather
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Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world
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Personal hatred and family affection are not incompatible they often flourish and grow strong together.
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How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!
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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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There was nothing but land not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
Willa Cather
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They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.
Willa Cather
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That is happiness to be dissolved into something complete and great.
Willa Cather
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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 is his great gift is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.
Willa Cather
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The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather