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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
Land
Grows
Beneath
Fiction
Grow
Feet

More quotes by Willa Cather

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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.
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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youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself betrayed.
Willa Cather
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
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The great fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake. The sun rose out of it, the day began there it was like an open door that nobody could shut. The land and all its dreariness could never close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you would soon be free.
Willa Cather
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The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
Willa Cather
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The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.
Willa Cather
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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.
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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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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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
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Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.
Willa Cather
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In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.
Willa Cather
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We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on cigar-box lids.
Willa Cather
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If youth did not matter so much to itself, it would never have the heart to go on.
Willa Cather
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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
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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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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.
Willa Cather
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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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Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.
Willa Cather