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Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.

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
Write
Book
Nothing
Writing
Made
Mattered
Kind
Books
Life
Possible
Living

More quotes by Willa Cather

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People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.
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Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.
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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
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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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It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled.
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Merely having seen the season change in a country gave one the sense of having been there for a long time.
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Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.
Willa Cather
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I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now.
Willa Cather
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In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities.
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Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.
Willa Cather
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The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.
Willa Cather
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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.
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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There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back.
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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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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[Mark Twain] is still the rough, awkward, good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands when he was three years old. Thoroughly likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters.
Willa Cather
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The end is nothing the road is all.
Willa Cather
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We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on cigar-box lids.
Willa Cather
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A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.
Willa Cather