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The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.

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
Like
Factories
Stops
Stillness
Emptiness
Intense
Silence
Running
Factory
Great
Machinery

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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.
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From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.
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Oh, this is the joy of the rose That it blows, And goes.
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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.
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Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
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I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.
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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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There was nothing but land not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
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The end is nothing the road is all.
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There seemed to be nothing to see no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
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Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
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Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.
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youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself betrayed.
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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.
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Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere.
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When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.
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Alexandra sighed. I have a feeling that if you go away, you will not come back. Something will happen to one of us, or to both. People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find. What I have is yours if you care enough about me to take it.
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Of course Nebraska is a storehouse of literary material. Everywhere is a storehouse of literary material. If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see.
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Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.
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