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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
Saddest
Secrets
Secret
Artist
Artistry

More quotes by 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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Of course Nebraska is a storehouse of literary material. Everywhere is a storehouse of literary material. If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see.
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.
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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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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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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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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The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.
Willa Cather
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Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.
Willa Cather
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Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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Money is a protection, a cloak it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity.
Willa Cather
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Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.
Willa Cather
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She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last.
Willa Cather
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Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
Willa Cather
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Alexandra sighed. I have a feeling that if you go away, you will not come back. Something will happen to one of us, or to both. People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find. What I have is yours if you care enough about me to take it.
Willa Cather
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More than him has done that, said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.
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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When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.
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.
Willa Cather