Quote

One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days.

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
Chance
Somewhere
Happiness
Hour
Upon
Lucky
Conditions
Cannot
Hold
Stumbles
Ends
Divine
Forecast
Make
Days
Forecasts
World
Hours
Fast

More quotes by 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.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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There was a new kind of strength in the gravity of her face, and her colors still gave her that look of deep-seated health and ardor.
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Too much information is rather deadening.
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Winter lies too long in country towns hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
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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.
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From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.
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If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry
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In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.
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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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A work-room should be like an old shoe no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.
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The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.
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.
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The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
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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.
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Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world but here the earth was the floor of the sky.
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Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.
Willa Cather