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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
Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.
Willa Cather
The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.
Willa Cather
More than him has done that, said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.
Willa Cather
The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
Willa Cather
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
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
It is a tragic hour, that hour when we are finally driven to reckon with ourselves, when every avenue of mental distraction has been cut off and our own life and all its ineffaceable failures closes about us like the walls of that old torture chamber of the Inquisition.
Willa Cather
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
A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
Willa Cather
Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.
Willa Cather
The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.
Willa Cather
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
Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.
Willa Cather
Money is a protection, a cloak it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity.
Willa Cather
The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life.
Willa Cather
There was only - spring itself, the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm high wind - rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive ... If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring.
Willa Cather
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.
Willa Cather
The summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact of the world.
Willa Cather
Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
Willa Cather
The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.
Willa Cather
