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I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.
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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Willa Sibert Cather
Snake
Snakes
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Killed
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Bigs
More quotes by Willa Cather
New things are always ugly.
Willa Cather
One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.
Willa Cather
The two friends stood for a few moments on the windy street corner, not speaking a word, as two travelers, who have lost their way, sometimes stand and admit their perplexity in silence. (O Pioneers!)
Willa Cather
The land belongs to the future.
Willa Cather
I have not much faith in women in fiction.... Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.
Willa Cather
Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
Willa Cather
Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.
Willa Cather
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
From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted and nobody knew why.
Willa Cather
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.
Willa Cather
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
Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.
Willa Cather
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.
Willa Cather
The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.
Willa Cather
Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
Willa Cather
In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.
Willa Cather
Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?
Willa Cather
Setting ... is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.
Willa Cather
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.
Willa Cather
If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.
Willa Cather
