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People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.

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
Tougher
Finds
Surface
Pain
Comes
Live
People

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The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.
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The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
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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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She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last.
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Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.
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There seemed to be nothing to see no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
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Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone.
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The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity.
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.
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She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends.
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Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.
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If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be.
Willa Cather
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Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.
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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 tell you there is such a thing as creative hate.
Willa Cather
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In great misfortunes, people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love--if once one has ever fallen in.
Willa Cather
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That is happiness to be dissolved into something complete and great.
Willa Cather
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When we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord.
Willa Cather
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Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.
Willa Cather
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Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
Willa Cather