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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.

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
Creation
Magical
Desire
Instrument
Process
Element
Inspirational
Measure
Life
Instruments
Achievement
Elements
Foretelling
Magic
Foretell

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The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
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The end is nothing the road is all.
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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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Success is never so interesting as struggle
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A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.
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Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.
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Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.
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I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
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Happy people do a great deal for their friends.
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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.
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Sometimes, I ventured, it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her.
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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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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.
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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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It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.
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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.
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Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.
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When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all.Willa Cather
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It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
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