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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
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Essayist
Journalist
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Willa Sibert Cather
Life
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Achievement
Elements
Foretelling
Magic
Foretell
Creation
Magical
Desire
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Too much information is rather deadening.
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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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There was nothing but land not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
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People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.
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I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!
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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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Look at my papa here he's been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him.
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Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness.
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In great misfortunes, people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love--if once one has ever fallen in.
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The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs and usually it's exactly the sort you are not.
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Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.
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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.
Willa Cather
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If youth did not matter so much to itself, it would never have the heart to go on.
Willa Cather
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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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The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
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Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?
Willa Cather
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The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.
Willa Cather
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Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.
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Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.
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Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.
Willa Cather