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 have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication.
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The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.
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Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
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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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Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.
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A work-room should be like an old shoe no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.
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Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.
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It is cremated youth. It is all yours--no one gave it to you.
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Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.
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Success is never so interesting as struggle
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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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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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The land belongs to the future.
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After all, the supreme virtue in all art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives art a right to be.
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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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More than him has done that, said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.
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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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To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
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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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