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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. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.

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
Talent
Bred
Sports
Foxes
Voice
Singer
Happens
Silver
Thing
Singers
Make
Sport
Like
Wild
World
Intelligence
Captivity

More quotes by Willa Cather

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Some things are best learned in calm, others in storm.
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People always think the bread of another country is better than their own.
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The land belongs to the future.
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Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.
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Pity is sworn servant unto love: And this be sure, wherever it begin To make the way, it lets your master in.
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We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it - for a little while.
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When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.
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Ugly accidents happen . . . always have and always will. But the failures are swept back into the pile and forgotten. They don`t leave any lasting scar in the world, and they don`t affect the future. The things that last are the good things. The people who forge ahead and do something, they really count.
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One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.
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The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.
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The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
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The test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.
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If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago.
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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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Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
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There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.
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Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
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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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Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.
Willa Cather
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The prayers of all good people are good.
Willa Cather