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

More quotes by Willa Cather

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Some people's lives are affected by what happens to their person or their property but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts -- that and nothing more.
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Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.
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The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person. Two people, when they love each other, grow alike in their tastes and habits and pride, but their moral natures (whatever we may mean by that canting expression) are never welded. The base one goes on being base, and the noble one noble, to the end.
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What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?
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In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities.
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Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.
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I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now.
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This land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces.
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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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Look at my papa here he's been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him.
Willa Cather
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One afternoon late in October of the year 1697, Euclide Auclair, the philosopher apothecary of Quebec, stood on the top of Cap Diamant gazing down the broad, empty river far beneath him.
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The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.
Willa Cather
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The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world.
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People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.
Willa Cather
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Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.
Willa Cather
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If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry
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I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
Willa Cather