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Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.

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
French
Classify
Arrange
Germans

More quotes by Willa Cather

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Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.
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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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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Success is never so interesting as struggle
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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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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Sometimes, I ventured, it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person. Two people, when they love each other, grow alike in their tastes and habits and pride, but their moral natures (whatever we may mean by that canting expression) are never welded. The base one goes on being base, and the noble one noble, to the end.
Willa Cather
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The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?
Willa Cather
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The great fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake. The sun rose out of it, the day began there it was like an open door that nobody could shut. The land and all its dreariness could never close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you would soon be free.
Willa Cather
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William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.
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.
Willa Cather
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In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded.
Willa Cather
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The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs and usually it's exactly the sort you are not.
Willa Cather
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People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.
Willa Cather
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They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.
Willa Cather