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Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.

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
Interesting
Less
Success
Great
Struggle
Effort
Pleasure

More quotes by Willa Cather

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It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.
Willa Cather
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The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life.
Willa Cather
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The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity.
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.
Willa Cather
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One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.
Willa Cather
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life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.
Willa Cather
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How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!
Willa Cather
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In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together.
Willa Cather
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There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
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.
Willa Cather
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There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.
Willa Cather
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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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A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.
Willa Cather
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Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
Willa Cather