Quote

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.

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
Reality
Mask
Light
Shadow
Truth
Summer
Everything
Green
Frivolities
Like
Lies
Trembled
Lying
Frivolity
Whether
Underneath
Living
Deceit

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Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
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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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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
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The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.
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Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
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I suppose there were moonless nights and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, but I remember them all as flooded with the rich indolence of a full moon.
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If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! “A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.
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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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When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.
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People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.
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Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.
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The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.
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Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?
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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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Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.
Willa Cather
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The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant on one's back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky.
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Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.
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Religion is different from everything else because in religion seeking is finding.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world but here the earth was the floor of the sky.
Willa Cather