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The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern.

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
Ones
Discreet
Seen
Discerning
Often
Discern
Littles
Bleed
May
Observing
Little
Begin
Kind
People
Usually

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I've seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too ful of life and love. They can't help it. Poeple come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter.
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A work-room should be like an old shoe no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.
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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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The land belongs to the future.
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In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities.
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Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.
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I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now.
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Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.
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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
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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.
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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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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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The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.
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I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication.
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What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
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Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.
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youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself betrayed.
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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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The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
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Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
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