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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
Sky
Earth
World
Roof
Elsewhere
Floor

More quotes by Willa Cather

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There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.
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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Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine.
Willa Cather
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For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.
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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No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses.
Willa Cather
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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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Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?
Willa Cather
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A work-room should be like an old shoe no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.
Willa Cather
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It is a tragic hour, that hour when we are finally driven to reckon with ourselves, when every avenue of mental distraction has been cut off and our own life and all its ineffaceable failures closes about us like the walls of that old torture chamber of the Inquisition.
Willa Cather
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Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.
Willa Cather
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You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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I have not much faith in women in fiction.... Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.
Willa Cather
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Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.
Willa Cather
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I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.
Willa Cather
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Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.
Willa Cather
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Oh, this is the joy of the rose That it blows, And goes.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather