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Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.

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
Details
Form
Become
Much
Like
Extravagance
Detail
Vulgar
Slightly

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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.
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One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.
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Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
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I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
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The end is nothing the road is all.
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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.
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Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
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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.
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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.
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When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.
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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.
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Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
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She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends.
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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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No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses.
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New things are always ugly.
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A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.
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Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.
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The prayers of all good people are good.
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It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.
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