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If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.

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
Great
Materials
Achieves
Thing
Writer
Enduring
Work
Achieve
Sympathy
Make
Fine
Endure
Alone
Noble
Anything
Material
Must
Gift
Giving
Absolutely

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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.
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In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart.
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Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.
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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.
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youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself betrayed.
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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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Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.
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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.
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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.
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Some people's lives are affected by what happens to their person or their property but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts -- that and nothing more.
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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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Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.
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Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
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Personal hatred and family affection are not incompatible they often flourish and grow strong together.
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Ugly accidents happen . . . always have and always will. But the failures are swept back into the pile and forgotten. They don`t leave any lasting scar in the world, and they don`t affect the future. The things that last are the good things. The people who forge ahead and do something, they really count.
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People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.
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Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
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Prayers said by good people are always good prayers
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The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.
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Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone.
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