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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

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More than him has done that, said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.
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William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.
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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. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.
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Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.
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I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
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Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.
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A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.
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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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The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
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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. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.
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Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
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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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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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Money is a protection, a cloak it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity.
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Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.
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The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.
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Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.
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I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything I begin just where I left off.
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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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We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on cigar-box lids.
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