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It is a tragic hour, that hour when we are finally driven to reckon with ourselves, when every avenue of mental distraction has been cut off and our own life and all its ineffaceable failures closes about us like the walls of that old torture chamber of the Inquisition.

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
Failure
Failures
Cutting
Walls
Reckon
Wall
Torture
Inquisition
Hours
Tragic
Closes
Every
Mental
Avenue
Life
Driven
Avenues
Like
Finally
Chamber
Hour
Distraction

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That is happiness to be dissolved into something complete and great.
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Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?
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This land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces.
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I suppose there were moonless nights and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, but I remember them all as flooded with the rich indolence of a full moon.
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Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
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Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.
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One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.
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Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere.
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There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
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Oh, this is the joy of the rose That it blows, And goes.
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I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
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It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
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Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.
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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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The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.
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Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.
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Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.
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Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness.
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I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known her about ever since I could remember anything at all.
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