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

More quotes by Willa Cather

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This land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces.
Willa Cather
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Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing.
Willa Cather
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Alexandra sighed. I have a feeling that if you go away, you will not come back. Something will happen to one of us, or to both. People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find. What I have is yours if you care enough about me to take it.
Willa Cather
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Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.
Willa Cather
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I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered –about her teeth for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things she had lost, *but whose inner glow has faded*. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.
Willa Cather
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The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.
Willa Cather
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The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
Willa Cather
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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.
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.
Willa Cather
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Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together.
Willa Cather
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Prayers said by good people are always good prayers
Willa Cather
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Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends.
Willa Cather
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Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern.
Willa Cather
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When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.
Willa Cather