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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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Willa Cather
Age: 73 †
Born: 1873
Born: December 7
Died: 1947
Died: April 24
Author
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Willa Sibert Cather
People
Individual
Kitchen
Trace
House
Noise
Slip
Thought
Surface
Caution
Live
Tried
Mice
Every
Taste
Slips
Make
Leave
Asleep
Things
Dark
Houses
Like
Natural
Appetite
Kitchens

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The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
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One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.
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You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?
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Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?
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There seemed to be nothing to see no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
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The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself.
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It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled.
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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.
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Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
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A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
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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.
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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.
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Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.
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All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.
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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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[Dawn] is always such a forgiving time. When that first cold, bright streak comes over the water, it's as if all our sins were pardoned as if the sky leaned over the earth and kissed it and gave it absolution.
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Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.
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Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.
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People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.
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That is happiness to be dissolved into something complete and great.
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