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

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It is cremated youth. It is all yours--no one gave it to you.
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What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
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The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
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More than him has done that, said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.
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From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted and nobody knew why.
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person. Two people, when they love each other, grow alike in their tastes and habits and pride, but their moral natures (whatever we may mean by that canting expression) are never welded. The base one goes on being base, and the noble one noble, to the end.
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When we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord.
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There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back.
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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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I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!
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Sometimes, I ventured, it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her.
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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She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends.
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Success is never so interesting as struggle
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Pity is sworn servant unto love: And this be sure, wherever it begin To make the way, it lets your master in.
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In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.
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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She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last.
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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.
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People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.
Willa Cather