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

More quotes by 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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Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.
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Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.
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The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.
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Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.
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Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
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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.
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In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities.
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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.
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One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.
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An artist's saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.
Willa Cather
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If youth did not matter so much to itself, it would never have the heart to go on.
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When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.
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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The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life.
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You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?
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Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin a bloody man, vicious a coarse man, vulgar.
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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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I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known her about ever since I could remember anything at all.
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The summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact of the world.
Willa Cather