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Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together.
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
Went
Shadows
Existence
Background
Came
Backgrounds
Individual
Held
Together
Meant
Nothing
Shadow
Reinforced
Something
Short
Endured
Life
Unless
Continually
More quotes by Willa Cather
I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication.
Willa Cather
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
People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.
Willa Cather
Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
Willa Cather
The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
Willa Cather
When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.
Willa Cather
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.
Willa Cather
Winter lies too long in country towns hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
Willa Cather
Happy people do a great deal for their friends.
Willa Cather
Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.
Willa Cather
I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!
Willa Cather
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
Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.
Willa Cather
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
There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.
Willa Cather
When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.
Willa Cather
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
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.
Willa Cather
One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.
Willa Cather
Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.
Willa Cather
