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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
Time
Artistic
Harder
Longer
Born
Artist
Makes
Much
Every

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A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.
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Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.
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Pity is sworn servant unto love: And this be sure, wherever it begin To make the way, it lets your master in.
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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.
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One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days.
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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.
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Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is.
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Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.
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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. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.
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All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.
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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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In great misfortunes, people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love--if once one has ever fallen in.
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Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.
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Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.
Willa Cather
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To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent.
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To fulfil the dreams of one's youth that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.
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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.
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Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
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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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In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded.
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