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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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Willa Cather
Age: 73 †
Born: 1873
Born: December 7
Died: 1947
Died: April 24
Author
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Willa Sibert Cather
Price
Gift
Pay
Talent
Whatever
World
People
Exceptional

More quotes by Willa Cather

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The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.
Willa Cather
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Where there is great love there are always miracles.
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.
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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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Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.
Willa Cather
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Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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When we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord.
Willa Cather
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Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.
Willa Cather
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Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is.
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
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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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Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.
Willa Cather
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To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but 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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The prayers of all good people are good.
Willa Cather
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The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.
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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Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.
Willa Cather
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The land belongs to the future.
Willa Cather