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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

More quotes by Willa Cather

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Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man of taste who does not very often get to Boston.
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Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
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People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.
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Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.
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Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.
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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.
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Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.
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Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?
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No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses.
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The end is nothing the road is all.
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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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The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.
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Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.
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I suppose there were moonless nights and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, but I remember them all as flooded with the rich indolence of a full moon.
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It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?
Willa Cather
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Religion is different from everything else because in religion seeking is finding.
Willa Cather
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Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.
Willa Cather
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In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded.
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There was nothing but land not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
Willa Cather
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A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.
Willa Cather