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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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Willa Cather
Age: 73 †
Born: 1873
Born: December 7
Died: 1947
Died: April 24
Author
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Willa Sibert Cather
Love
Greatest
World
Alone
People
Within
Saddest
Fall
Occur
Ever
Misfortunes
Right
Surely
Great
Fallen
Thing
Falling

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Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world
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Success is never so interesting as struggle
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Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
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The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
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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.
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
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Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.
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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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Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.
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A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
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The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
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Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.
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The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.
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Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.
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Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?
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To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
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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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Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.
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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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The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.
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