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Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere.

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
Often
Mean
Anywhere
Needed
Freedom
Means

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The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
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When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all.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.
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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.
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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.
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The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern.
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
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If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! “A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.
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I tell you there is such a thing as creative hate.
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Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.
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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Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.
Willa Cather
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Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
Willa Cather
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In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities.
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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.
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This is reality, whether you like it or not--all those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.
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Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
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The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.
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