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Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.

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
Beneath
Fiction
Grow
Feet
Land
Grows

More quotes by Willa Cather

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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.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.
Willa Cather
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Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.
Willa Cather
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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
Willa Cather
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Personal hatred and family affection are not incompatible they often flourish and grow strong together.
Willa Cather
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Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.
Willa Cather
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Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.
Willa Cather
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The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life.
Willa Cather
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The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
Willa Cather
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Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world
Willa Cather
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person. Two people, when they love each other, grow alike in their tastes and habits and pride, but their moral natures (whatever we may mean by that canting expression) are never welded. The base one goes on being base, and the noble one noble, to the end.
Willa Cather
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For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.
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.
Willa Cather
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There was nothing but land not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
Willa Cather
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A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
Willa Cather
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Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.
Willa Cather
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Some things are best learned in calm, others in storm.
Willa Cather