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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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Willa Cather
Age: 73 †
Born: 1873
Born: December 7
Died: 1947
Died: April 24
Author
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Willa Sibert Cather
Artist
Makes
Much
Every
Artistic
Time
Harder
Longer
Born

More quotes by Willa Cather

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Thea was still under the belief that public opinion could be placated that if you clucked often enough, the hens would mistake you for one of themselves.
Willa Cather
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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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If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago.
Willa Cather
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Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.
Willa Cather
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Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.
Willa Cather
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We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on cigar-box lids.
Willa Cather
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Religion is different from everything else because in religion seeking is finding.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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Winter lies too long in country towns hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
Willa Cather
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Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
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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Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.
Willa Cather
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She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends.
Willa Cather
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I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered –about her teeth for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things she had lost, *but whose inner glow has faded*. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.
Willa Cather
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Imagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on — a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation.
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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The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.
Willa Cather
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Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man of taste who does not very often get to Boston.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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After all, the supreme virtue in all art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives art a right to be.
Willa Cather