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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
Existence
Background
Came
Backgrounds
Individual
Held
Together
Meant
Nothing
Shadow
Reinforced
Something
Short
Endured
Life
Unless
Continually
Went
Shadows
More quotes by Willa Cather
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
Willa Cather
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.
Willa Cather
Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?
Willa Cather
The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.
Willa Cather
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
More than him has done that, said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.
Willa Cather
It is a tragic hour, that hour when we are finally driven to reckon with ourselves, when every avenue of mental distraction has been cut off and our own life and all its ineffaceable failures closes about us like the walls of that old torture chamber of the Inquisition.
Willa Cather
Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.
Willa Cather
How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!
Willa Cather
In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart.
Willa Cather
I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.
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
Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
Willa Cather
Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.
Willa Cather
Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is.
Willa Cather
What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
Willa Cather
The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.
Willa Cather
In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.
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
Look at my papa here he's been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him.
Willa Cather
