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Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world but here the earth was the floor of the sky.

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
Floor
Sky
Earth
World
Roof
Elsewhere

More quotes by Willa Cather

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Look at my papa here he's been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him.
Willa Cather
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Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
Willa Cather
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A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.
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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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There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
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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.
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.
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If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! “A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.
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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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Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions of them.
Willa Cather
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After all, the supreme virtue in all art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives art a right to be.
Willa Cather
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The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.
Willa Cather
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One afternoon late in October of the year 1697, Euclide Auclair, the philosopher apothecary of Quebec, stood on the top of Cap Diamant gazing down the broad, empty river far beneath him.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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The summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact of the world.
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
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Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
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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Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.
Willa Cather
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Art, it seems to me, should simplify.
Willa Cather