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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
Live
Tried
Mice
Every
Taste
Slips
Make
Leave
Asleep
Things
Dark
Houses
Like
Natural
Appetite
Kitchens
People
Individual
Kitchen
Trace
House
Noise
Slip
Thought
Surface
Caution

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The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.
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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.
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A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.
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Art, it seems to me, should simplify.
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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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All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.
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Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.
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I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.
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There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
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Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.
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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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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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Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.
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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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Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world but here the earth was the floor of the sky.
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I have not much faith in women in fiction.... Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.
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I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything I begin just where I left off.
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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.
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I've seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too ful of life and love. They can't help it. Poeple come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter.
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It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
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