"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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Willa Cather quotes (page 6 of 12)
240 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there - that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself."
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"Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection."
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"A burnt dog dreads the fire."
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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."
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"We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on cigar-box lids."
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"The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman."
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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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"Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything."
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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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"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."
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"Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer."
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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."
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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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"Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them."
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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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"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."
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"Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches."
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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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