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Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.

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
Makes
Must
Every
World
Creativity
Bring
Born
Artist

More quotes by Willa Cather

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It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
Willa Cather
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Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.
Willa Cather
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Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.
Willa Cather
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The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?
Willa Cather
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Happy people do a great deal for their friends.
Willa Cather
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Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world but here the earth was the floor of the sky.
Willa Cather
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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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Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.
Willa Cather
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A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.
Willa Cather
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Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.
Willa Cather
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There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
Willa Cather
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Personal hatred and family affection are not incompatible they often flourish and grow strong together.
Willa Cather
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I've seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too ful of life and love. They can't help it. Poeple come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity.
Willa Cather