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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
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Willa Sibert Cather
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More quotes by Willa Cather
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
Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine.
Willa Cather
Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.
Willa Cather
The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
Willa Cather
Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world
Willa Cather
Personal hatred and family affection are not incompatible they often flourish and grow strong together.
Willa Cather
life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
Willa Cather
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
The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.
Willa Cather
Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing.
Willa Cather
All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.
Willa Cather
One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.
Willa Cather
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
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
Prayers said by good people are always good prayers
Willa Cather
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
Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.
Willa Cather
Merely having seen the season change in a country gave one the sense of having been there for a long time.
Willa Cather
Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.
Willa Cather
There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
Willa Cather