Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Willa Cather, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Willa Cather quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 333 Willa Cather quotes for you to read and share.

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All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens. -- Willa Cather
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The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current. -- Willa Cather
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He looked up quietly. "You know, don't you, Thee, that I think you are just the finest thing I've struck in this world?"
The tears ran down Thea's cheeks. "You're too good to me, Ray. You're a lot too good to me," she faltered. -- Willa Cather
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A group of girls with their hair hanging loose over their shoulders, and the most strident voices imaginable, sold flowers at the foot of an equestrian statue, done in bronze by Thornycroft when the Empress was a young woman. -- Willa Cather
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You can't tell me anything about family life. I've had plenty to last me.' 'But it's not all like that,' I objected. 'Near enough. It's all being under somebody's thumb. -- Willa Cather
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In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching. -- Willa Cather
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I sat helpless to prevent the closing of that chapter of idyllic love, dreading the return of the young man whose ineffable happiness was only to be the measure of his fall. I -- Willa Cather
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She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. -- Willa Cather
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There were other times when she was so shattered by ideas that she could do nothing worth while; when they trampled over her like an army and she felt as if she were bleeding to death under them. -- Willa Cather
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Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach. -- Willa Cather
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Even after I had pounded his ugly head flat, his body kept on coiling and winding, doubling and falling back on itself. -- Willa Cather
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My dear," he sighed when the lights were turned on and they both looked older, "it's been a mistake, our having a family and writing histories and getting middle-aged. We should have been picturesquely shipwrecked together when we were young. -- Willa Cather
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Money is a protection, a cloak; it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity. -- Willa Cather
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Sometimes I rode north to the big prairie-dog town to watch the brown earth-owls fly home in the late afternoon and go down to their nests underground with the dogs. -- Willa Cather
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Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear
ourselves! Until then we have not lived. -- Willa Cather
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Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer. -- Willa Cather
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The children you don't especially need, you have always with you, like the poor. But the bright ones get away from you. They have their own way to make in the world. Seems like the brighter they are, the farther they go. -- Willa Cather
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...Now did you ever hear of a young feller's having such hard luck, Mrs. Burden?"

Grandma told him she was sure the Lord had remembered these things to his credit, and had helped him out of many a scrape when he didn't realize that he was being protected by Providence. -- Willa Cather
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She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends. -- Willa Cather
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Alexandra sighed. I have a feeling that if you go away, you will not come back. Something will happen to one of us, or to both. People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find. What I have is yours, if you care enough about me to take it. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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The summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact of the world. -- Willa Cather
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If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine. -- Willa Cather
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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? -- Willa Cather
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The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like a bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. -- Willa Cather
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Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them. -- Willa Cather
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She took off her jacket and sat more at ease in her blouse, of some soft, flimsy silk. -- Willa Cather
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She was quick to anger, quick to laughter, and jolly from the depths of her soul. -- Willa Cather
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The feeling that he was near the conclusion of his life was an instinctive conviction, such as we have when we waken in the dark and know at once that it is near morning; or when we are walking across the country and suddenly know that we are near the sea. Letters came every week -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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what unprotected faces they were; their very roughness and violence made them defenseless. These boys had no practiced manner behind which they could retreat and hold people at a distance. -- Willa Cather
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One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers. -- Willa Cather
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I was thinking", he answered absently, "about Euripides; how, when he was an old man, he went and lived in a cave by the sea, and it was thought queer at the time. It seems that houses had become insupportable to him. I wonder whether it was because he had observed women so closely all his life. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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Miracles ... seem to me to rest not so much upon ... healing power coming suddenly near us from afar but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that, for a moment, our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there around us always. -- Willa Cather
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The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always. -- Willa Cather
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There are times when one's vitality is too high to be clouded, too elastic to stay down. -- Willa Cather
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Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed. -- Willa Cather
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Of course Nebraska is a storehouse of literary material. Everywhere is a storehouse of literary material. If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see. -- Willa Cather
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I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known her about ever since I could remember anything at all. -- Willa Cather
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Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning! -- Willa Cather
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His ideas about the future would not crystallize; the more he tried to think about it, the vaguer his conception if it became. -- Willa Cather
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About us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see her face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest, realest face, under all the shadows of women's faces, at the very bottom of my memory. "I'll -- Willa Cather
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One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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The wild roses were wide open and brilliant, the blue-eyed grass was in purple flower, and the silvery milkweed was just coming on. -- Willa Cather
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Personal hatred and family affection are not incompatible; they often flourish and grow strong together. -- Willa Cather
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You feel that, properly, Alexandra's house is the big-out-of-doors, and that it is in the soil that she expresses herself.
-O Pioneers -- Willa Cather
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Language was like clothes; it could be a help to one, or it could give one away. But the most important thing was that one should not pretend to be what one was not. -- Willa Cather
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It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled. -- Willa Cather
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The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. -- Willa Cather
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It's by understanding me, and the boys, and mother, that you have helped me. I expect that is the only way one person ever really can help another. -- Willa Cather
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She began to wonder whether she would not do better to finish her life alone. What was left of life seemed unimportant. -- Willa Cather
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He was entirely rid of his nervous misgivings, of his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire to show himself different from his surroundings. He felt now that his surroundings explained him. -- Willa Cather
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He's made himself a rabbit-skin cap, Jim, and a rabbit-skin collar that he buttons on outside his coat. They ain't got but one overcoat among 'em over there, and they take turns wearing it. They seem awful scared of cold, and stick in that hole in the bank like badgers. -- Willa Cather
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the miracle happened; one of those quiet moments that clutch the heart, and take more courage than the noisy, excited passages in life. -- Willa Cather
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Father Latour began to tell them about his friendly relations with Protestants in Ohio, but they had not room in their minds for two ideas. -- Willa Cather
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He knew he would always remember her, standing there with that expectant, forward-looking smile, enough to turn the future into summer. -- Willa Cather
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He used to say that he never felt the hardness of the human struggle or the sadness of history as he felt it among those ruins. He used to say, too, that it made one feel an obligation to do one's best. -- Willa Cather
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I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister
anything a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me. -- Willa Cather
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If youth did not matter so much to itself, it would never have the heart to go on. -- Willa Cather
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I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow. -- Willa Cather
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Doctrine is well enough for the wise, Jean; but the miracle is something we can hold in our hands and love. -- Willa Cather
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[Dawn] is always such a forgiving time. When that first cold, bright streak comes over the water, it's as if all our sins were pardoned; as if the sky leaned over the earth and kissed it and gave it absolution. -- Willa Cather
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Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness? -- Willa Cather
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Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself. -- Willa Cather
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Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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Yes, it was possible that the little world, on its voyage among all the stars, might become like that; a boat on which one could travel no longer, from which one could no longer look up and confront those bright rings of revolution. -- Willa Cather
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Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. -- Willa Cather
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Most beautiful of all was the tarnished gold of the elms, with a little brown in it, a little bronze, a little blue, even
a blue like amethyst, which made them melt into the azure haze with a kind of happiness, a harmony of mood that filled the air with content. -- Willa Cather
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There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm. -- Willa Cather
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Her interest in these people was more than a business interest. She carried them all in her mind as if they were characters in a book or a play. When -- Willa Cather
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One afternoon late in October of the year 1697, Euclide Auclair, the philosopher apothecary of Quebec, stood on the top of Cap Diamant gazing down the broad, empty river far beneath him. -- Willa Cather
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This land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces. -- Willa Cather
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Her eye, her ear, were tuning forks, burning glasses, which caught the minutest refraction or echo of a thought or feeling ... She heard a deeper vibration, a kind of composite echo, of all that the writer said, and did not say. -- Willa Cather
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They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it. -- Willa Cather
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When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting. -- Willa Cather
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The country girls were considered a menace to the social order. Their beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background. -- Willa Cather
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I can't altogether tell myself, Lillian. It's not wholly a matter of the calendar. It's the feeling that I've put a great deal behind me, where I can't go back to it again - and I don't really wish to go back. The way would be too long and too fatiguing. -- Willa Cather
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That is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great. -- Willa Cather
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Her rapid footsteps shook her own floors, and she routed lassitude and indifference wherever she came. -- Willa Cather
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You must pray for him, my child. It is to such as he that our Blessed Mother comes nearest. -- Willa Cather
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Prayers said by good people are always good prayers -- Willa Cather
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As long as there is one house there must be one hand. -- Willa Cather
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person. -- Willa Cather
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As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass. -- Willa Cather
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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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It seems to me that the pleasure one feels in a work of art is just one thing that one does not have to explain. -- Willa Cather
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. . . she had always the power of suggesting things much lovelier than herself, as the perfume of a single flower may call up the whole sweetness of spring. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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I believed devoutly in her power to fascinate him, in her dazzling loveliness. I believed her young, ardent, reckless, disillusioned, under sentence, feverish, avid of pleasure. -- Willa Cather
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Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies. -- Willa Cather
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Then you do not believe in progress?" "Change is not always progress, Monseigneur. -- Willa Cather
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I shall do nothing to discourage my patient, Monseigneur, any more than I shall bleed him, as many good people urge me to do. The mind, too, has a kind of blood; in common speech we call it hope. -- Willa Cather
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I only knew the schoolbooks said he "died in the wilderness, of a broken heart."
"More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent. -- Willa Cather
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But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive anywhere else. Or how. -- Willa Cather
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Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things. -- Willa Cather
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When I'm in normal health, I'm a Presbyterian, but just now I feel that even the wicked get worse than they deserve. -- Willa Cather
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If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry -- Willa Cather
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And I advise ye to think well, he told her It's better to be a stray dog in this world than a man without money. I've tried it both ways, and I know. A poor man stinks, and God hates him. -- Willa Cather
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Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. -- Willa Cather
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From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted; and nobody knew why. -- Willa Cather
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She had no little vanities, only one big one, and she would never forgive. -- Willa Cather
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Thy judgment seat, which is also Thy mercy seat.' All -- Willa Cather
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A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man. -- Willa Cather
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A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one. -- Willa Cather
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There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. -- Willa Cather
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They [her eyes] were big and warm and full of light, like the sun shining on brown pools in the wood. -- Willa Cather
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I never get tired of them old stars, Thee. I miss 'em up in Washington and Oregon where it's misty. Like 'em best down in Mother Mexico, where they have everything their own way. I'm not for any country where the stars are dim. -- Willa Cather
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A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude. -- Willa Cather
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Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past. -- Willa Cather
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But I can't help feeling scared when I think how I will miss you- more than you will ever know. -- Willa Cather
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I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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The two friends stood for a few moments on the windy street corner, not speaking a word, as two travelers, who have lost their way, sometimes stand and admit their perplexity in silence. (O Pioneers!) -- Willa Cather
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I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story. -- Willa Cather
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The truth is, it is enough to live in this country. Just to live. Work isn't necessary for the salvation of the soul. -- Willa Cather
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The glorious transmutation of autumn had come on: all the vast Canadian shores were clothed with a splendour never seen in France; to which all the pageants of all the kings were as a taper to the sun. -- Willa Cather
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But she's the kind that won't be downed easily. She'll work all day and go to a Bohemian wedding and dance all night, and drive the hay wagon for a cross man next morning. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen. -- Willa Cather
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The test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. -- Willa Cather
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Since then she had changed so much in her thoughts, in her ways, even in her looks, that she might wonder she knew herself
except that the changes were all in the direction of becoming more and more herself. -- Willa Cather
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It was only one splendid breath they had, in spite of their brave mockery at the winter outside the glass; and it was a losing game in the end, it seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which the world is run. -- Willa Cather
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I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is. -- Willa Cather
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I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping ... Alone, -- Willa Cather
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It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious. -- Willa Cather
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Because he talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull from constant use. -- Willa Cather
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The air and the earth interpenetrated in the warm gusts of spring; the soil was full of sunlight, and the sunlight full of red dust. The air one breathed was saturated with earthy smells, and the grass under foot had a reflection of the blue sky in it. -- Willa Cather
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Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet. -- Willa Cather
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You never really knew a man, he said, until you saw him die -- Willa Cather
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Constant comparisons are the stamp of the foreigner; one continually translates manners and customs of a new country into terms of his own, before he can fully comprehend them. -- Willa Cather
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Be generous with yourself. Don't stop short of splendid things. -- Willa Cather
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Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding. -- Willa Cather
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As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running. -- Willa Cather
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It's not a pleasant place to be lying while the world is moving and doing and bettering... but it rather seems as though we ought to go back to the place we came from in the end. -- Willa Cather
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Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, to strong to stop, too sweet to lose. -- Willa Cather
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The prayers of all good people are good. -- Willa Cather
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The Count himself was ready to die, and he would be glad to die here alone, without pretence and mockery, with no troop of expectant relatives about his bed. The world was not what he had thought it at twenty
or even at forty. -- Willa Cather
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The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman. -- Willa Cather
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The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own. -- Willa Cather
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Some people's lives are affected by what happens to their person or property, but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts
that and nothing more. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'. -- Willa Cather
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In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart. -- Willa Cather
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You either have to be utterly common place or else do the thing people don't want, because it has not yet been invented. No really new and original thing is wanted: people have to learn to like new things. -- Willa Cather
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The Sun shone into my bath water through the West half window, and a big Maltese cat came and rub himself against the tub, watching me curiously. While I scrubbed my grandmother busy herself in the dining room. -- Willa Cather
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Too much information is rather deadening. -- Willa Cather
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The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself. -- Willa Cather
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Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection. -- Willa Cather
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It was to him a very strange and perplexing place, where people wore fine clothes and had hard hearts. -- Willa Cather
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There is no God but one God and Art is his revealer; that's my creed and I'll follow it to the end, to a hotter place than Pittsburgh if need be. -- Willa Cather
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Don't love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you. Oh, dear boy, pray that whatever your sacrifice may be, it be not that. -- Willa Cather
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That was the first time I ever saw Anton Jelinek. -- Willa Cather
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As far as we could see, the miles of copper red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of day -- Willa Cather
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To fulfil the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that. -- Willa Cather
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I know that I am going away on my own account. I must make the usual effort. I must have something to show for myself. To take what you would give me, I should have to be either a very large man or a very small one, and I am only in the middle class. -- Willa Cather
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Ah, he thought, for one who cannot read--or think--the Image, the physical form of Love! -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true ... she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. -- Willa Cather
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During those last weeks of the Bishop's life he thought very little about death; it was the Past he was leaving. The future would take care of itself. -- Willa Cather
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Her secret? It is every artist's secret
passion. That is all. It is an open secret, and perfectly safe. Like heroism, it is inimitable in cheap materials. -- Willa Cather
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She had always insisted, against all evidence, that life was full of
fairy tales, and it was! -- Willa Cather
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As I confronted her, the changes grew less apparent to me, her identity stronger. She was there, in the full vigour of her personality, battered but not diminished, looking at me, speaking to me in the husky, breathy voice I remembered so well. -- Willa Cather
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I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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To be sure, the Bishop was a little theatrical in his humility, as he had been in his grandeur; but that was his way, Auclair reflected, and, after all, nobody can help his way. If a man admits his mistakes, that is a great deal ... -- Willa Cather
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The old man smiled. 'I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived. -- Willa Cather
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Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique. -- Willa Cather
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When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all.Willa Cather -- Willa Cather
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Theoretically he knew that life is possible, may even be pleasant, without joy, without passionate griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to live like that. -- Willa Cather
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The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world. -- Willa Cather
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How easy it would be to dream one's life out in some cleft in the world. -- Willa Cather
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That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero's death - heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day. How -- Willa Cather
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I suppose there were moonless nights and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, but I remember them all as flooded with the rich indolence of a full moon. -- Willa Cather
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Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to
leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark. -- Willa Cather
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Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement. -- Willa Cather
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Today I stood taller from walking among the trees. -- Willa Cather
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Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James. -- Willa Cather
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The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. -- Willa Cather
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I wondered whether the life that was right for one was ever right for two! I -- Willa Cather
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Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years. -- Willa Cather
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Oh, he's an old friend from the West," said Eden easily. "I won't introduce you, because he doesn't like people. He's a recluse. Good-bye. -- Willa Cather
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Grandfather's farm sometime before daybreak, after -- Willa Cather
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The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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There was a new kind of strength in the gravity of her face, and her colors still gave her that look of deep-seated health and ardor. -- Willa Cather
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Happy people do a great deal for their friends. -- Willa Cather
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Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. -- Willa Cather
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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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Niel felt tonight that the right man could still save her, even now. She was still her own indomitable self, going through her old part,--but only the stage hands were left to listen to her. All those who had shared in fine undertakings and bright occasions were gone. -- Willa Cather
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Everywhere the grain stood ripe and the hot afternoon was full of the smell of the ripe wheat, like the smell of bread baking in an oven. The breath of the wheat and the sweet clover passed him like pleasant things in a dream. -- Willa Cather
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The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young. -- Willa Cather
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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
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Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening. -- Willa Cather
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Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone. -- Willa Cather
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She was like someone in whom the faculty of becoming interested is worn out. -- Willa Cather
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prayed for the poor and destitute in great cities, where the struggle for life was harder than it was here with us. -- Willa Cather
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I liked to watch a play with Lena; everything was wonderful to her, and everything was true. It was like going to revival meetings with someone who was always being converted. -- Willa Cather
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Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness. -- Willa Cather
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Setting ... is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger. -- Willa Cather
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In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way; but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded. -- Willa Cather
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What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose. -- Willa Cather
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William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke. -- Willa Cather
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Nothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing - desire. And before it, when it is big, all is little. -- Willa Cather
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A soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup. -- Willa Cather
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The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he noticed, their red glory all over. -- Willa Cather
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Things away from home often look better than they are. -- Willa Cather
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When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open. -- Willa Cather
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It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the foundation of early races. -- Willa Cather
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It was just my point that I saw altogether too much of the people we knew. My -- Willa Cather
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Avarice, he assured them, was the one passion that grew stronger and sweeter in old age. -- Willa Cather
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Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar. -- Willa Cather
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Imagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on - a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation. -- Willa Cather
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man can do anything if he wishes to enough, St. Peter believed. Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement. He -- Willa Cather
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How deep they lay, these second persons, and how little one knew about them, except to guard them fiercely. It was to music, more than to anything else, that these hidden things in people responded. -- Willa Cather
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Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke. -- Willa Cather
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Where there is great love, there are always miracles. -- Willa Cather
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Miracles surround us at every turn, if we but sharpen our perceptions to them. -- Willa Cather
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only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would be only sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass. -- Willa Cather
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A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves. -- Willa Cather
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Everywhere now there was the smell of burning grass. -- Willa Cather
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The grudge was fundamental. Perhaps he could not have given it up if he tried. Perhaps he got more satisfaction out of feeling himself abused that he would have got out of being loved. -- Willa Cather
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I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off. -- Willa Cather
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You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you? -- Willa Cather
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In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever. -- Willa Cather
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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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He had missed the deepest of all companionships, a relation with the earth itself, with a countryside and a people. That relationship he knew cannot be gone after and found; it must be long and deliberate, unconscious. It must, indeed, be a way of living. -- Willa Cather
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It is cremated youth. It is all yours
no one gave it to you. -- Willa Cather
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Poor soul, poor soul!' grandmother groaned. 'I'd like to think -- Willa Cather
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And what I like best in you is this particular enthusiasm, which is not at all practical or sensible, which is downright Quixotic. You are not altogether what you seem, and you have your reservations. Living among the wolves, you have not become one. -- Willa Cather
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Montaigne says somewhere that in early youth the joy of life lies in the feet. -- Willa Cather
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I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now. -- Willa Cather
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From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas. -- Willa Cather
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When we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord. -- Willa Cather
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The spark in his eye, which is one's very self, caught the spark in hers that was herself, and for a moment they looked into each other's natures. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot. -- Willa Cather
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We must rest, he told himself, on our confidence in His design. Design was clear enough in the stars, the seasons, in the woods and fields. But in human affairs - ? Perhaps our bewilderment came from a fault in our perceptions; we could never see what was behind the next turn of the road. -- Willa Cather
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We will never lose the land. -- Willa Cather
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The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it's exactly the sort you are not. -- Willa Cather
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I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. -- Willa Cather
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Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer. -- Willa Cather
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Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort. -- Willa Cather
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Well, this I know: our best years are when we're working hardest and going right ahead when we can hardly see our way out. -- Willa Cather
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Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody. -- Willa Cather
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Oh, better I like to work out-of-doors than in a house!' she used to sing joyfully. 'I not care that your grandmother say it makes me like a man. I like to be like a man. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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Merely having seen the season change in a country gave one the sense of having been there for a long time. -- Willa Cather
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What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart? -- Willa Cather
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I tell you there is such a thing as creative hate. -- Willa Cather
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Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said ... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret? -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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One is best in one's own country. -- Willa Cather
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People always think the bread of another country is better than their own. -- Willa Cather
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We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on cigar-box lids. -- Willa Cather
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In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance; from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities. -- Willa Cather
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Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world -- Willa Cather
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Wherever and whenever that piece is put on, it is April. -- Willa Cather
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In their death as in their life the Latins are more socially disposed than we, and the graves in their cemeteries almost always touch each other, they are so closely crowded together. -- Willa Cather
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for the French clergy, -- Willa Cather
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The land belongs to the future. -- Willa Cather
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The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but the first-rate writer can only be experience. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate. -- Willa Cather
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Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches. -- Willa Cather
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I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived. -- Willa Cather
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Art, it seems to me, should simplify. -- Willa Cather
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New things are always ugly. -- Willa Cather
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A watch is the most essential part of a lecture. -- Willa Cather
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Have the last word ma'm," he said cheerfully, "It's a lady's priviledge. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people. -- Willa Cather
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Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes. -- Willa Cather
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I've seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too ful of life and love. They can't help it. Poeple come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter. -- Willa Cather
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There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon. -- Willa Cather
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Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky! -- Willa Cather
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If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be. -- Willa Cather
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I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered
about her teeth, for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life. -- Willa Cather
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Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer. -- Willa Cather
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I could feel his heart pump and his muscles strain," she said, "when he balanced himself and me on the rocks. I knew that if we fell, we'd go together; he would never drop me". -- Willa Cather
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Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness. -- Willa Cather
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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. -- Willa Cather
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And that's what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own individual lives. -- Willa Cather
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An artist's saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry. -- Willa Cather
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It's awfully easy to rush into a profession you don't really like, and awfully hard to get out of it. -- Willa Cather
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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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Oh, this is the joy of the rose;
That it blows,
And goes. -- Willa Cather
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Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere. -- Willa Cather
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The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand. -- Willa Cather
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Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange. -- Willa Cather
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It takes a great deal of experience to become natural. -- Willa Cather
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I only want impossible things," she said roughly. "The others don't interest me. -- Willa Cather
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Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife
beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table. -- Willa Cather
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What was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mold in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself. -- Willa Cather
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Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there - that, it seems to me, is created. -- Willa Cather
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People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find. -- Willa Cather
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We sat down and made a nest in the long red grass. Yulka curled up like a baby rabbit and played with a grasshopper -- Willa Cather
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Pity is sworn servant unto love: And this be sure, wherever it begin To make the way, it lets your master in. -- Willa Cather
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How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives! -- Willa Cather
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People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know. -- Willa Cather
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Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. -- Willa Cather
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The supreme virtue in art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives it the right to be. -- Willa Cather
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The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor. -- Willa Cather
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Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is. -- Willa Cather
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Youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself betrayed. -- Willa Cather
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The end is nothing, the road is all -- Willa Cather
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I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two! -- Willa Cather
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People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again - but it finds a tougher surface. -- Willa Cather
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Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact. -- Willa Cather
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Success is never so interesting as struggle -- Willa Cather
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Some things are best learned in calm, others in storm. -- Willa Cather
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The way, they were -- Willa Cather
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The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running. -- Willa Cather
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The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing - desire. -- Willa Cather
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You might tell me next week, Miller, what you think science has done for us, besides making us very comfortable." As -- Willa Cather
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She had seen it when she was at home last summer - the hostility of comfortable, self-satisfied people toward serious effort. -- Willa Cather
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It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of. -- Willa Cather
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A burnt dog dreads the fire. -- Willa Cather
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Lena slipped her silk sleeves into the jacket I held for her, smoothed it over her person, and buttoned it slowly. -- Willa Cather
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Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best. -- Willa Cather