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Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.

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
Phlegmatic
Stupid
Teach

More quotes by Willa Cather

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The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
Willa Cather
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From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.
Willa Cather
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Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
Willa Cather
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All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.
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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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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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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Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.
Willa Cather
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The prayers of all good people are good.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.
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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The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.
Willa Cather
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Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.
Willa Cather
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I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered –about her teeth for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things she had lost, *but whose inner glow has faded*. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.
Willa Cather
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In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded.
Willa Cather
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The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself.
Willa Cather
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All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.
Willa Cather