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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
Born
Artist
Makes
Much
Every
Time
Artistic
Harder
Longer

More quotes by 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.
Willa Cather
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How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!
Willa Cather
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I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
Willa Cather
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Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.
Willa Cather
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Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world but here the earth was the floor of the sky.
Willa Cather
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The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
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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I suppose there were moonless nights and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, but I remember them all as flooded with the rich indolence of a full moon.
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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In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.
Willa Cather
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I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication.
Willa Cather
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Alexandra sighed. I have a feeling that if you go away, you will not come back. Something will happen to one of us, or to both. People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find. What I have is yours if you care enough about me to take it.
Willa Cather
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A soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.
Willa Cather
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Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.
Willa Cather
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That is happiness to be dissolved into something complete and great.
Willa Cather
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Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together.
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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Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
Willa Cather
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The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs and usually it's exactly the sort you are not.
Willa Cather
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The prayers of all good people are good.
Willa Cather