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If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago.

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
Time
Force
Keep
Better
Writing
Guard
Work
Mature
Much
Quiet
Years
Five
Things
Perfect

More quotes by Willa Cather

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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 this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.
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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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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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Look at my papa here he's been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him.
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Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.
Willa Cather
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On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.
Willa Cather
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The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.
Willa Cather
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Personal hatred and family affection are not incompatible they often flourish and grow strong together.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.
Willa Cather
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Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.
Willa Cather
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The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere.
Willa Cather
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Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world
Willa Cather
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If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be.
Willa Cather
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Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.
Willa Cather
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Setting ... is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.
Willa Cather
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I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!
Willa Cather