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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
Humans
Thing
Life
World
Bigs
People
Desire
Littles
Little
Human

More quotes by Willa Cather

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The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.
Willa Cather
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Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
Willa Cather
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Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
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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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
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The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity.
Willa Cather
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[Mark Twain] is still the rough, awkward, good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands when he was three years old. Thoroughly likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters.
Willa Cather
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A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.
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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This land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces.
Willa Cather
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Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.
Willa Cather
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They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.
Willa Cather
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Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is.
Willa Cather
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The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
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.
Willa Cather
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Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world
Willa Cather
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How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!
Willa Cather
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The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
Willa Cather
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Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.
Willa Cather
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There seemed to be nothing to see no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
Willa Cather