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You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?
Willa Cather
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Willa Cather
Age: 73 †
Born: 1873
Born: December 7
Died: 1947
Died: April 24
Author
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Essayist
Journalist
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Willa Sibert Cather
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People
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Successes
Cheap
More quotes by Willa Cather
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
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.
Willa Cather
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
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.
Willa Cather
Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
Willa Cather
The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.
Willa Cather
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
youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself betrayed.
Willa Cather
Some people's lives are affected by what happens to their person or their property but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts -- that and nothing more.
Willa Cather
Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.
Willa Cather
For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.
Willa Cather
It is cremated youth. It is all yours--no one gave it to you.
Willa Cather
Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.
Willa Cather
Too much information is rather deadening.
Willa Cather
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
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.
Willa Cather
The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
Willa Cather
There seemed to be nothing to see no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
Willa Cather
Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.
Willa Cather
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
