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Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.

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
Ruined
Writers
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Successes
Publishers

More quotes by Willa Cather

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Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.
Willa Cather
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The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
Willa Cather
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The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life.
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People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.
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If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.
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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The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant on one's back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky.
Willa Cather
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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
Willa Cather
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We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it - for a little while.
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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The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
Willa Cather
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I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.
Willa Cather
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Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.
Willa Cather
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I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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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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Merely having seen the season change in a country gave one the sense of having been there for a long time.
Willa Cather
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Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.
Willa Cather