Quote

Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.

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
Feels
Turn
Prefer
Even
Friends
Foolish
Men
Turns
Sticks
Cranky
Time
Father
Wild
Accountable
Like
Tell
Soon
Fathers
Home
Begin
Marry
Right
Nobody
Sensible
Feel
Ones
Stick

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Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.
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The air and the earth interpenetrated in the warm gusts of spring the soil was full of sunlight, and the sunlight full of red dust. The air one breathed was saturated with earthy smells, and the grass under foot had a reflection of the blue sky in it.
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Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.
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It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?
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Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.
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From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted and nobody knew why.
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To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent.
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People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.
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Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
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Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.
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Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.
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The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.
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The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
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For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.
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One afternoon late in October of the year 1697, Euclide Auclair, the philosopher apothecary of Quebec, stood on the top of Cap Diamant gazing down the broad, empty river far beneath him.
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The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
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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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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
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Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.
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The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
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