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Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.

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
Richer
Imaginative
Personal
Becomes
Life
Paler

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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.
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It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled.
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The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.
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Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
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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.
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Ugly accidents happen . . . always have and always will. But the failures are swept back into the pile and forgotten. They don`t leave any lasting scar in the world, and they don`t affect the future. The things that last are the good things. The people who forge ahead and do something, they really count.
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The two friends stood for a few moments on the windy street corner, not speaking a word, as two travelers, who have lost their way, sometimes stand and admit their perplexity in silence. (O Pioneers!)
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It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
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Thea was still under the belief that public opinion could be placated that if you clucked often enough, the hens would mistake you for one of themselves.
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Imagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on — a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation.
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From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.
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The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.
Willa Cather
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Happy people do a great deal for their friends.
Willa Cather
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The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.
Willa Cather
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I suppose there were moonless nights and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, but I remember them all as flooded with the rich indolence of a full moon.
Willa Cather
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life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
Willa Cather
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Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.
Willa Cather
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Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.
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I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.
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