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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
World
People
Exceptional
Price
Gift
Pay
Talent
Whatever

More quotes by Willa Cather

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The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.
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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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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Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.
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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I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication.
Willa Cather
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Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
Willa Cather
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Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.
Willa Cather
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The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.
Willa Cather
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I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
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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Merely having seen the season change in a country gave one the sense of having been there for a long time.
Willa Cather
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A soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.
Willa Cather
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I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything I begin just where I left off.
Willa Cather
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There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
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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Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.
Willa Cather
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It is a tragic hour, that hour when we are finally driven to reckon with ourselves, when every avenue of mental distraction has been cut off and our own life and all its ineffaceable failures closes about us like the walls of that old torture chamber of the Inquisition.
Willa Cather
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The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself.
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