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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

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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
Right
Giving
Thing
Supreme
Perhaps
Gives
Virtue
Art
Soul

More quotes by Willa Cather

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Setting ... is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.
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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.
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People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.
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The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
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All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.
Willa Cather
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The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual those who were not have been long forgotten.
Willa Cather
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[Dawn] is always such a forgiving time. When that first cold, bright streak comes over the water, it's as if all our sins were pardoned as if the sky leaned over the earth and kissed it and gave it absolution.
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.
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That is happiness to be dissolved into something complete and great.
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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From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted and nobody knew why.
Willa Cather
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What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
Willa Cather
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They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.
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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Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.
Willa Cather
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An artist's saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.
Willa Cather
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A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
Willa Cather
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Art, it seems to me, should simplify.
Willa Cather
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Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.
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