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This land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces.

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
Horse
Pieces
Land
Break
Enigma
Running
Harness
Things
Kicks
Like
Runs
Wild

More quotes by Willa Cather

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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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There was nothing but land not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
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[Mark Twain] is still the rough, awkward, good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands when he was three years old. Thoroughly likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters.
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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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The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.
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Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.
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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.
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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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I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything I begin just where I left off.
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Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.
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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The land belongs to the future.
Willa Cather
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How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!
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In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart.
Willa Cather
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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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Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.
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Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.
Willa Cather