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Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.

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
Wonder
Trusts
Thinking
Hands
Ghastly
Women
Joke
Ever
Mess
Sometimes
Jokes
Must
Usually
Talent
Make
Sort
Infernal
Think

More quotes by Willa Cather

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All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.
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A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.
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The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.
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I suppose there were moonless nights and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, but I remember them all as flooded with the rich indolence of a full moon.
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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.
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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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People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.
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Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.
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Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?
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Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.
Willa Cather
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The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
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How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!
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Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.
Willa Cather
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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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Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.
Willa Cather
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Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.
Willa Cather
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A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
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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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.
Willa Cather
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I have not much faith in women in fiction.... Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.
Willa Cather