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The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.

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
Little
Human
Humans
Thing
Life
World
Bigs
People
Desire
Littles

More quotes by Willa Cather

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The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world.
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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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There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
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When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all.Willa Cather
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Sometimes, I ventured, it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her.
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life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
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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.
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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.
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Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine.
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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If youth did not matter so much to itself, it would never have the heart to go on.
Willa Cather
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Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
Willa Cather
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The land belongs to the future.
Willa Cather
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The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.
Willa Cather
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The two friends stood for a few moments on the windy street corner, not speaking a word, as two travelers, who have lost their way, sometimes stand and admit their perplexity in silence. (O Pioneers!)
Willa Cather
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Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions of them.
Willa Cather
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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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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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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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Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.
Willa Cather