"Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin."
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Quote collection
Willa Cather quotes (page 9 of 12)
240 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Oh, this is the joy of the rose; That it blows, And goes."
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"New things are always ugly."
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"The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running."
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"To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent."
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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 work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one."
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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."
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"Many people seem to think that art is a luxury to be imported and tacked on to life. Art springs out of the very stuff that life is made of. Most of our young authors start to write a story and make a few observations from nature to add local color. The results are invariably false and hollow. Art must spring out of the fullness and richness of life."
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"Every artist knows that there is no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion."
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"There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back."
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"Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it."
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"Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had."
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"The summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact of the world."
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"youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself betrayed."
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"What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?"
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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."
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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."
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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."
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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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