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The test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.

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
Fight
Fighting
Found
Decency
Wanted
Stopped
Writing
Caring
Test
Much
Tests
Never
Please
People

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Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is.
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One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.
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Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
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Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.
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Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.
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Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.
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The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.
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The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.
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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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Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.
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Happy people do a great deal for their friends.
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Too much information is rather deadening.
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William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.
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Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.
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The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.
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Prayers said by good people are always good prayers
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Winter lies too long in country towns hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
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Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
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It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac's own estimate, one has lived in vain.
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Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.
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