Quote

Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from 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
Life
Seeking
Greedily
Half
Satisfactory
Away
Wholly
Human
Pulling
Humans
Necessity
Every
Tragic
Never
Ego
Time
Relationships

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The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
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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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In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.
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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
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The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual those who were not have been long forgotten.
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This is reality, whether you like it or not--all those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.
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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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Some things are best learned in calm, others in storm.
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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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Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
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New things are always ugly.
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The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.
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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.
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The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.
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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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On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.
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Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
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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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Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is.
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Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
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