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Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.

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
Starts
Wherever
Hardest
Sacred
Mere
Lifted
Humanity
Brutality
Made
Spot
Spots

More quotes by 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.
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Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones.
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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.
Willa Cather
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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.
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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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Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.
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One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days.
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Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.
Willa Cather
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It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
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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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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I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!
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 man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.
Willa Cather
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Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.
Willa Cather
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Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.
Willa Cather
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Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together.
Willa Cather
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To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent.
Willa Cather
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It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?
Willa Cather
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The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
Willa Cather