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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
Great
Struggle
Effort
Pleasure
Interesting
Less
Success

More quotes by Willa Cather

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It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?
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Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.
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Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.
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Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.
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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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I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.
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There was a new kind of strength in the gravity of her face, and her colors still gave her that look of deep-seated health and ardor.
Willa Cather
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Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
Willa Cather
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The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
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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The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
Willa Cather
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The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.
Willa Cather
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We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it - for a little while.
Willa Cather
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Imagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on — a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation.
Willa Cather
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Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing.
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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[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.
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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The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.
Willa Cather
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Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.
Willa Cather