Quote

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

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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
Sometimes
Streets
Pioneers
Way
Silence
Traveler
Stand
Stood
Word
Corner
Friends
Admit
Lost
Corners
Perplexity
Moments
Speaking
Windy
Two
Street
Travelers

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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The summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact of the world.
Willa Cather
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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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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.
Willa Cather
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New things are always ugly.
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.
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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.
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Oh, this is the joy of the rose That it blows, And goes.
Willa Cather
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A soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.
Willa Cather
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Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?
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Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.
Willa Cather
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William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.
Willa Cather
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Sometimes, I ventured, it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her.
Willa Cather
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Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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Alexandra sighed. I have a feeling that if you go away, you will not come back. Something will happen to one of us, or to both. People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find. What I have is yours if you care enough about me to take it.
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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The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.
Willa Cather
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I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything I begin just where I left off.
Willa Cather