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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.

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
People
Moments
Shipwreck
Place
Drop
Become
Kindness
Reason
Afraid
Even
Security
Something
Inspirational
Always
Left
Malevolent
Like
Found
Bottomless

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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.
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The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.
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That is happiness to be dissolved into something complete and great.
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I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.
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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.
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It is cremated youth. It is all yours--no one gave it to you.
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Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.
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youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself betrayed.
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People always think the bread of another country is better than their own.
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The end is nothing the road is all.
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There seemed to be nothing to see no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
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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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A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.
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If youth did not matter so much to itself, it would never have the heart to go on.
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The great fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake. The sun rose out of it, the day began there it was like an open door that nobody could shut. The land and all its dreariness could never close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you would soon be free.
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Some things are best learned in calm, others in storm.
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Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.
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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
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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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Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.
Willa Cather