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An artist's saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.

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
Artist
Artistry
Saddest
Secrets
Secret

More quotes by Willa Cather

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One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.
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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In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.
Willa Cather
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I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered –about her teeth for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things she had lost, *but whose inner glow has faded*. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.
Willa Cather
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The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
Willa Cather
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[Mark Twain] is still the rough, awkward, good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands when he was three years old. Thoroughly likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters.
Willa Cather
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The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.
Willa Cather
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There was nothing but land not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
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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A work-room should be like an old shoe no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.
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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If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be.
Willa Cather
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The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
Willa Cather
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The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.
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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Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.
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.
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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Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
Willa Cather
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Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.
Willa Cather