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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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If youth did not matter so much to itself, it would never have the heart to go on.
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I have not much faith in women in fiction.... Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.
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Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin a bloody man, vicious a coarse man, vulgar.
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This land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces.
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If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be.
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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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life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
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I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!
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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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To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent.
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In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded.
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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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Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.
Willa Cather
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I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
Willa Cather
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Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.
Willa Cather
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Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
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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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I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered –about her teeth for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things she had lost, *but whose inner glow has faded*. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.
Willa Cather
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Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.
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An artist's saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.
Willa Cather