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

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She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends.
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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.
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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.
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Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.
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Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.
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Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.
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[Mark Twain] is still the rough, awkward, good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands when he was three years old. Thoroughly likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters.
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When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.
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People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.
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After all, the supreme virtue in all art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives art a right to be.
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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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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.
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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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When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.
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All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.
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It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.
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The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.
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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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Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
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Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.
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