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The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.

Willa Cather

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Willa Cather
Age: 73 †
Born: 1873
Born: December 7
Died: 1947
Died: April 24
Author
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Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
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Willa Sibert Cather
Second
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Escapes
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More quotes by Willa Cather

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A soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.
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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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The land belongs to the future.
Willa Cather
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Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
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Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.
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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Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.
Willa Cather
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I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.
Willa Cather
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The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.
Willa Cather
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Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.
Willa Cather
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People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.
Willa Cather
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Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
Willa Cather
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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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Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.
Willa Cather
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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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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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Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.
Willa Cather
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I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now.
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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New things are always ugly.
Willa Cather