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Art, it seems to me, should simplify.

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
Simplify
Simplicity
Art
Seems

More quotes by Willa Cather

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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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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.
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I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
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The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.
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Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone.
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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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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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Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.
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Some things are best learned in calm, others in storm.
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People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.
Willa Cather
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Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.
Willa Cather
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Setting ... is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.
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If youth did not matter so much to itself, it would never have the heart to go on.
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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Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.
Willa Cather
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A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.
Willa Cather
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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 great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.
Willa Cather
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In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.
Willa Cather