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The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
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
Matter
Restriction
Much
Censorship
Every
Foreign
Condition
Requires
Conditions
Freedom
Censoring
Art
Intrusion
More quotes by Willa Cather
To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent.
Willa Cather
Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.
Willa Cather
Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone.
Willa Cather
[Dawn] is always such a forgiving time. When that first cold, bright streak comes over the water, it's as if all our sins were pardoned as if the sky leaned over the earth and kissed it and gave it absolution.
Willa Cather
The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
Willa Cather
Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
Willa Cather
I have not much faith in women in fiction.... Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.
Willa Cather
Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
Willa Cather
Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
Willa Cather
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
All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.
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
The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.
Willa Cather
From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.
Willa Cather
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
If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be.
Willa Cather
People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.
Willa Cather
The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.
Willa Cather
You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?
Willa Cather
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
