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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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Willa Cather
Age: 73 †
Born: 1873
Born: December 7
Died: 1947
Died: April 24
Author
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Willa Sibert Cather
Nothing
Country
Made
Creeks
Starlight
Material
Countries
Materials
Land

More quotes by Willa Cather

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It is cremated youth. It is all yours--no one gave it to you.
Willa Cather
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Thea was still under the belief that public opinion could be placated that if you clucked often enough, the hens would mistake you for one of themselves.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.
Willa Cather
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The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself.
Willa Cather
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Of course Nebraska is a storehouse of literary material. Everywhere is a storehouse of literary material. If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see.
Willa Cather
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Imagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on — a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation.
Willa Cather
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[Dawn] is always such a forgiving time. When that first cold, bright streak comes over the water, it's as if all our sins were pardoned as if the sky leaned over the earth and kissed it and gave it absolution.
Willa Cather
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It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
Willa Cather
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Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.
Willa Cather
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life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
Willa Cather
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A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.
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?
Willa Cather
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Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.
Willa Cather
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A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
Willa Cather
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I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known her about ever since I could remember anything at all.
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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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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If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! “A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.
Willa Cather
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To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent.
Willa Cather