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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
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Willa Sibert Cather
Fret
Successes
Cheap
Begin
Must
People

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Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.
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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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Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
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One afternoon late in October of the year 1697, Euclide Auclair, the philosopher apothecary of Quebec, stood on the top of Cap Diamant gazing down the broad, empty river far beneath him.
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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.
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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.
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There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back.
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Prayers said by good people are always good prayers
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A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.
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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.
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The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity.
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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. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.
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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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Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.
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[Dawn] is always such a forgiving time. When that first cold, bright streak comes over the water, it's as if all our sins were pardoned as if the sky leaned over the earth and kissed it and gave it absolution.
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Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is.
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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
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If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.
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If youth did not matter so much to itself, it would never have the heart to go on.
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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.
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