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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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To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent.
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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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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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The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
Willa Cather
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Money is a protection, a cloak it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity.
Willa Cather
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She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last.
Willa Cather
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Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin a bloody man, vicious a coarse man, vulgar.
Willa Cather
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There was only - spring itself, the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm high wind - rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive ... If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring.
Willa Cather
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The summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact of the world.
Willa Cather
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The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity.
Willa Cather
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The end is nothing the road is all.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.
Willa Cather
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One afternoon late in October of the year 1697, Euclide Auclair, the philosopher apothecary of Quebec, stood on the top of Cap Diamant gazing down the broad, empty river far beneath him.
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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The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern.
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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The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
Willa Cather
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Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.
Willa Cather
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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. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.
Willa Cather