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It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac's own estimate, one has lived in vain.

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
Live
Mad
Little
Twenty
Take
Vain
Never
Twenties
Balzac
Lived
Estimate
Stills
Exaggeration
Still
Scarcely
Littles
Forty

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To fulfil the dreams of one's youth that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.
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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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On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.
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Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is.
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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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The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.
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Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.
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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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Some people's lives are affected by what happens to their person or their property but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts -- that and nothing more.
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In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart.
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There seemed to be nothing to see no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
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Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.
Willa Cather
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youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself betrayed.
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If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be.
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That is happiness to be dissolved into something complete and great.
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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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Of course Nebraska is a storehouse of literary material. Everywhere is a storehouse of literary material. If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see.
Willa Cather
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The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual those who were not have been long forgotten.
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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Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.
Willa Cather