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A work-room should be like an old shoe no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.

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
Work
Shabby
Like
Shoe
Boots
Shoes
Room
Rooms
Better

More quotes by Willa Cather

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Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.
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Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.
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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.
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Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness.
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A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
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If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.
Willa Cather
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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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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.
Willa Cather
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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
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Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.
Willa Cather
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Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
Willa Cather
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We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it - for a little while.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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Some people's lives are affected by what happens to their person or their property but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts -- that and nothing more.
Willa Cather
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Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.
Willa Cather
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Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
Willa Cather
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Personal hatred and family affection are not incompatible they often flourish and grow strong together.
Willa Cather
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A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.
Willa Cather
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I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything I begin just where I left off.
Willa Cather
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How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!
Willa Cather