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

More quotes by Willa Cather

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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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The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.
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Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere.
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An artist's saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.
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Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
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When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all.Willa Cather
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If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry
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Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world
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In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.
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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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What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?
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All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.
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From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted and nobody knew why.
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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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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?
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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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This is reality, whether you like it or not--all those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.
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Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
Willa Cather
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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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Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.
Willa Cather