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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I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
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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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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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The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant on one's back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky.
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The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
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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.
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Money is a protection, a cloak it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity.
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Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.
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Winter lies too long in country towns hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
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When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.
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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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In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart.
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If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! “A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.
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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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For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.
Willa Cather
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Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.
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The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern.
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Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.
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Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man of taste who does not very often get to Boston.
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Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.
Willa Cather