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The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.

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
Ecstasy
Brown
Alive
Fear
Death
Earth
Heart
Aches
Much
Ache

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A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
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life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
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It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?
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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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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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In great misfortunes, people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love--if once one has ever fallen in.
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A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.
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Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.
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In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.
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Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere.
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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.
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Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.
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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.
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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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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.
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Some people's lives are affected by what happens to their person or their property but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts -- that and nothing more.
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
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The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
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The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.
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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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