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It Has Long Been A Tradition Among Novel Writers That A Book Must End By Everybody Getting Just What They Wanted, Or If The Conventional Happy Ending Was Impossible, Then It Must Be A Tragedy In Which One Or Both Should Die. In Real Life Very Few Of Us Get What We Want, Our Tragedies Don't Kill Us, But We Go On Living Them Year After Year, Carrying Them With Us Like A Scar On An Old Wound.

-Willa Cather

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It Has Long Been

Willa Cather

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It Has Long Been A Tradition Among Novel Writers That A Book Must End By Everybody Getting Just What They Wanted, Or If The Conventional Happy Ending Was Impossible, Then It Must Be A Tragedy In Which One Or Both Should Die. In Real Life Very Few Of Us Get What We Want, Our Tragedies Don't Kill Us, But We Go On Living Them Year After Year, Carrying Them With Us Like A Scar On An Old Wound.

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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.

Nearly All The Escapists In The Long Past Have Managed Their Own Budget And Their Social Relations So Unsuccessfully That I Wouldn't Want Them For My Landlords, Or My Bankers, Or My Neighbors. They Were Valuable, Like Powerful Stimulants, Only When They Were Left Out Of The Social And Industrial Routine.

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.

Exaggeration Is

There Is A Popular Superstition That "realism" Asserts Itself In The Cataloguing Of A Great Number Of Material Objects, In Explaining Mechanical Processes, The Methods Of Operating Manufactories And Trades, And In Minutely And Unsparingly Describing Physical Sensations. But Is Not Realism, More Than It Is Anything Else, An Attitude Of Mind On The Part Of The Writer Toward His Material, A Vague Indication Of The Sympathy And Candour With Which He Accepts, Rather Than Chooses, His Theme?

Winter Lies Too Long In Country Towns; Hangs On Until It Is Stale And Shabby, Old And Sullen.

Men Are All Right For Friends, But As Soon As You Marry Them They Turn Into Cranky Old Fathers, Even The Wild Ones. They Begin To Tell You What's Sensible And What's Foolish, And Want You To Stick At Home All The Time. I Prefer To Be Foolish When I Feel Like It, And Be Accountable To Nobody.

The Emptiness Was Intense, Like The Stillness In A Great Factory When The Machinery Stops Running.

The Fact That I Was A Girl Never Damaged My Ambitions To Be A Pope Or An Emperor.

I Kept As Still As I Could. Nothing Happened. I Did Not Expect Anything To Happen. I Was Something That Lay Under The Sun And Felt It, Like The Pumpkins, And I Did Not Want To Be Anything More. I Was Entirely Happy. 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. At Any Rate, That Is Happiness; To Be Dissolved Into Something Complete And Great. When It Comes To One, It Comes As Naturally As Sleep.

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.

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.

Now I Understood That The Same Road Was To Bring Us Together Again. Whatever We Had Missed, We Possessed Together The Precious, The Incommunicable Past.

I Had Killed A Big Snake. I Was Now A Big Fellow.

It Is Easy To Pity When Once One's Vanity Has Been Tickled.

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.

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.

The Only Thing Very Noticeable About Nebraska Was That It Was Still, All Day Long, Nebraska.

Pittsburgh Was Even More Vital, More Creative, More Hungry For Culture Than New York. Pittsburgh Was The Birthplace Of My Writing.

Love Itself Draws On A Woman Nearly All The Bad Luck In The World

Desire Is Creation, Is The Magical Element In That Process. If There Were An Instrument By Which To Measure Desire, One Could Foretell Achievement.

Merely Having Seen The Season Change In A Country Gave One The Sense Of Having Been There For A Long Time.

I Don't Want Anyone Reading My Writing To Think About Style. I Just Want Them To Be In The Story.

The Irregular And Intimate Quality Of Things Made Entirely By The Human Hand.

Ugly Accidents Happen . . . Always Have And Always Will. But The Failures Are Swept Back Into The Pile And Forgotten. They Don`t Leave Any Lasting Scar In The World, And They Don`t Affect The Future. The Things That Last Are The Good Things. The People Who Forge Ahead And Do Something, They Really Count.

The World Is Little, People Are Little, Human Life Is Little. There Is Only One Big Thing — Desire.

Freedom So Often Means That One Isn't Needed Anywhere. Here You Are An Individual, You Have A Background Of Your Own, You Would Be Missed. But Off There In The Cities There Are Thousands Of Rolling Stones Like Me. We Are All Alike; We Have No Ties, We Know Nobody, We Own Nothing.

I Wanted To Walk Straight On Through The Red Grass And Over The Edge Of The World, Which Could Not Be Very Far Away. The Light And Air Abot Me Told Me That The World Ended Here: Only The Ground And Sun And Sky Were Left, And If One Went A Little Farther There Would Only Be 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.

There Seemed To Be Nothing To See; No Fences, No Creeks Or Trees, No Hills Or Fields. If There Was A Road, I Could Not Make It Out In The Faint Starlight. There Was Nothing But Land: Not A Country At All, But The Material Out Of Which Countries Are Made.

Let Your Fiction Grow Out Of The Land Beneath Your Feet.

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.

Too Much Detail Is Apt, Like Any Other Form Of Extravagance, To Become Slightly Vulgar.

There Was Only - Spring Itself, The Throb Of It, The Light Restlessness, The Vital Essence Of It Everywhere; In The Sky, In The Swift Clouds, In The Pale Sunshine, And In The Warm High Wind - Rising Suddenly, Sinking Suddenly, Impulsive ... If I Had Been Tossed Down Blindfold On That Red Prairie, I Should Have Known That It Was Spring.

Only A Woman, Divine, Could Know All That A Woman Can Suffer.

Even The Wicked Get Worse Than They Deserve.

The Prayers Of All Good People Are Good.

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.

It Is Cremated Youth. It Is All Yours--no One Gave It To You.

It Takes A Great Deal Of Experience To Become Natural.

Too Much Information Is Rather Deadening.

Too Much Information

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.

That Is Happiness; To Be Dissolved Into Something Complete And Great.

Sometimes Falling In Love May Look Like Pure Madness To Those Not Experiencing It But That's Only Because They're Not Involved. Just Because Other People Don't Understand Your Feelings Doesn't Mean They're Not Real Or They're Not Important. You Have To Trust Yourself. Feel What You Feel And Don't Worry About Anyone Else. Love Is About You And Your Significant Other, Remember That.

Falling In Love

Yet The Summer Which Was To Change Everything Was Coming Nearer Every Day. 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.

Prayers Said By Good People Are Always Good Prayers

The Heart Of Another Is A Dark Forest, Always, No Matter How Close It Has Been To One's Own.

I Have Not Much Faith In Women In Fiction.... Women Are So Horribly Subjective And They Have Such Scorn For The Healthy Commonplace. When A Woman Writes A Story Of Adventure, A Stout Sea Tale, A Manly Battle Yarn, Anything Without Wine, Women, And Love, Then I Will Begin To Hope For Something Great From Them, Not Before.

If There Were No Girls Like Them In The World, There Would Be No Poetry

Religion And Art Spring From The Same Root And Are Close Kin.

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.

Falling In Love

People Can Be Lovers And Enemies At The Same Time, You Know.

The "sayings" Of A Community, Its Proverbs, Are Its Characteristic Comment Upon Life; They Imply Its History, Suggest Its Attitude Toward The World And Its Way Of Accepting Life. Such An Idiom Makes The Finest Language Any Writer Can Have; And He Can Never Get It With A Notebook. He Himself Must Be Able To Think And Feel In That Speech - It Is A Gift From Heart To Heart.

The Qualities Of A Second-rate Writer Can Easily Be Defined, But A First-rate Writer Can Only Be Experienced. It Is Just The Thing In Him Which Escapes Analysis That Makes Him First-rate.

Writing Ought Either To Be The Manufacture Of Stories For Which There Is A Market Demand - A Business As Safe And Commendable As Making Soap Or Breakfast Foods - Or It Should Be An Art, Which Is Always A Search For Something For Which There Is No Market Demand, Something New And Untried, Where The Values Are Intrinsic And Have Nothing To Do With Standardized Values.

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.

The Great Fact In Life, The Always Possible Escape From Dullness, Was The Lake. The Sun Rose Out Of It, The Day Began There; It Was Like An Open Door That Nobody Could Shut. The Land And All Its Dreariness Could Never Close In On You. You Had Only To Look At The Lake, And You Knew You Would Soon Be Free.

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.

An Artist's Saddest Secrets Are Those That Have To Do With His Artistry.

Youth, Art, Love, Dreams, True-heartedness - Why Must They Go Out Of The Summer World Into Darkness?

The Idea Of You Is A 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. In The Course Of Twenty Crowded Years One Parts With Many Illusions... I Did Not Wish To Lose The Early Ones. Some Memories Are Realities, And Are Better Than Anything That Can Ever Happen Again.

When Kindness Has Left People, Even For A Few Moments, We Become Afraid Of Them, As If Their Reason Had Left Them.

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.

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.

One May Have Staunch Friends In One's Own Family, But One Seldom Has Admirers.

One Realizes That 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. In Those Simple Relationships Of Loving Husband And Wife, Affectionate Sisters, Children And Grandmother, There Are Innumerable Shades Of Sweetness And Anguish Which Make Up The Pattern Of Our Lives Day By Day, Though They Are Not Down In The List Of Subjects From Which The Conventional Novelist Works.

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.

Oh, The Germans Classify, But The French Arrange.

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.

People Live Through Such Pain Only Once. Pain Comes Again—but It Finds A Tougher Surface.

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.

Beautiful Women, Whose Beauty Meant More Than It Said... Was Their Brilliancy Always Fed By Something Coarse And Concealed? Was That Their Secret?

Today I Stood Taller From Walking Among The Trees.

Art, It Seems To Me, Should Simplify.

A Creative Writer Can Do His Best Only With What Lies Within The Range And Character Of His Deepest Sympathies.

People Always Think The Bread Of Another Country Is Better Than Their Own.

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.

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.

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.

Personal Hatred And Family Affection Are Not Incompatible; They Often Flourish And Grow Strong Together.

The Land Belongs To The Future.

People Have To Snatch At Happiness When They Can, In This World. It Is Always Easier To Lose Than To Find.

We Come And Go, But The Land Is Always Here. And The People Who Love It And Understand It Are The People Who Own It - For A Little While.

If The Street Life, Not The Whitechapel Street Life, But That Of The Common But So-called Respectable Part Of Town Is In Any City More Gloomy, More Ugly, More Grimy, More Cruel Than In London, I Certainly Don't Care To See It. Sometimes It Occurs To One That Possibly All The Failures Of This Generation, The World Over, Have Been Suddenly Swept Into London, For The Streets Are A Restless, Breathing, Malodorous Pageant Of The Seedy Of All Nations.

This Generation

No One Can Build His Security Upon The Nobleness Of Another Person. Two People, When They Love Each Other, Grow Alike In Their Tastes And Habits And Pride, But Their Moral Natures (whatever We May Mean By That Canting Expression) Are Never Welded. The Base One Goes On Being Base, And The Noble One Noble, To The End.

I Like Trees Because They Seem More Resigned To The Way They Have To Live Than Other Things Do.

When The Eyes Of The Flesh Are Shut, The Eyes Of The Spirit Are Open.

New Things Are Always Ugly.

Paris Is A Hard Place To Leave, Even When It Rains Incessantly And One Coughs Continually From The Dampness.

The Great Fact Was The Land Itself, Which Seemed To Overwhelm The Little Beginnings Of Human Society That Struggled In Its Sombre Wastes.

There Was Nothing But Land; Not A Country At All, But The Material Out Of Which Countries Are Made.

In Haverford On The Platte The Townspeople Still Talk Of Lucy Gayheart.

The Summer Moon Hung Full In The Sky. For The Time Being It Was The Great Fact Of The World.

The Sincerity Of Feeling That Is Possible Between A Writer And A Reader Is One Of The Finest Things I Know.

Money Is A Protection, A Cloak; It Can Buy One Quiet, And Some Sort Of Dignity.

A Burnt Dog Dreads The Fire.

Most Publishers, Like Most Writers, Are Ruined By Their Successes.

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.

Let People Go On Talking As They Like, And We Will Go On Living As We Think Best.

Ah! The Terror And The Delight Of That Moment When First We Fear Ourselves! Until Then We Have Not Lived.

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.

The Great Pines Stand At A Considerable Distance From Each Other. Each Tree Grows Alone, Murmurs Alone, Thinks Alone. They Do Notintrude Upon Each Other. The Navajos Are Not Much In The Habit Of Giving Or Of Asking Help. Their Language Is Not A Communicative One, And They Never Attempt An Interchange Of Personality In Speech. Over Their Forests There Is The Same Inexorable Reserve. Each Tree Has Its Exalted Power To Bear.

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.

Our Tree Became The Talking Tree Of The Fairy Tale; Legends And Stories Nestled Like Birds In Its Branches.

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!)

The History Of Every Country Begins In The Heart Of A Man Or A Woman.

He Had Been To See Mrs. Erlich Just Before Starting Home For The Holidays, And Found Her Making German Christmas Cakes. She Took Him Into The Kitchen And Explained The Almost Holy Traditions That Governed This Complicated Cookery. Her Excitement And Seriousness As She Beat And Stirred Were Very Pretty, Claude Thought. She Told Off On Her Fingers The Many Ingredients, But He Believed There Were Things She Did Not Name: The Fragrance Of Old Friendships, The Glow Of Early Memories, Belief In Wonder-working Rhymes And Songs.

Every Artist Makes Herself Born. You Must Bring The Artist Into The World Yourself.

Happy People Do A Great Deal For Their Friends.

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.

Nothing Mattered ... But Writing Books, And Living The Kind Of Life That Made It Possible To Write Them.

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.

Oh, This Is The Joy Of The Rose; That It Blows, And Goes.

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.

Personal Life Becomes Paler As The Imaginative Life Becomes Richer.

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.

No Nation Has Ever Produced Great Art That Has Not Made A High Art Of Cookery, Because Art Appeals Primarily To The Senses.

Henry Colbert, The Miller, Always Breakfasted With His Wife--beyond That He Appeared Irregularly At The Family Table.

[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.

The Heart, When It Is Too Much Alive, Aches For That Brown Earth, And Ecstasy Has No Fear Of Death.

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.

I First Met Myra Henshawe When I Was Fifteen, But I Had Known Her About Ever Since I Could Remember Anything At All.

[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.

The Pale, Cold Light Of The Winter Sunset Did Not Beautify - It Was Like The Light Of Truth Itself.

But 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. 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. All The Strong Things Of Her Heart Came Out In Her Body, That Had Been So Tireless In Serving Generous Emotions. It Was No Wonder That Her Sons Stood Tall And Straight. She Was A Rich Mine Of Life, Like The Founders Of Early Races.

A Child's Attitude Toward Everything Is An Artist's Attitude.

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.

Religion Is Different From Everything Else; Because In Religion Seeking Is Finding.

We All Like People Who Do Things, Even If We Only See Their Faces On Cigar-box Lids.

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.

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.

Hunger Is A Powerful Incentive To Introspection.

The Stupid Believe That To Be Truthful Is Easy; Only The Artist, The Great Artist, Knows How Difficult It Is.

I Ain't Got Time To Learn. I Can Work Like Mans Now.

Life Hurrying Past Us And Running Away, Too Strong To Stop, Too Sweet To Lose.

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.

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.

In This World People Have To Pay An Extortionate Price For Any Exceptional Gift Whatever.

It Does Not Matter Much Whom We Live With In This World, But It Matters A Great Deal Whom We Dream Of.

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.

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

Success Is Less Interesting Than Struggle. There Is Great Pleasure In The Effort.

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.

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.

Where There Is Great Love There Are Always Miracles.

What If - What If Life Itself Were The Sweetheart?

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.

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.

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.

How Terrible It Was To Love People When You Could Not Really Share Their Lives!

Some People's Lives Are Affected By What Happens To Their Person Or Their Property; But For Others Fate Is What Happens To Their Feelings And Their Thoughts -- That And Nothing More.

Loyal? As Loyal As Anyone Who Plays Second Fiddle Ever Is.

Life Began For Me, When I Ceased To Admire And Began To Remember.

Old Men Are Like That, You Know. It Makes Them Feel Important To Think They Are In Love With Somebody.

Inspirational Love

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.

[some] People Really Expect The Passion Of Love To Fill And Gratify Every Need Of Life, Whereas Nature Only Intended That It Should Meet One Of Many Demands. They Insist On Making It Stand For All The Emotional Pleasures Of Life And Art; Expecting An Individual And Self-limited Passion To Yield Infinite Variety, Pleasure, And Distraction, And To Contribute To Their Lives What The Arts And The Pleasurable Exercise Of The Intellect Gives To Less Limited And Less Intense Idealists.

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.

Most Of The Basic Material A Writer Works With Is Acquired Before The Age Of Fifteen.

A Pioneer Should Have Imagination, Should Be Able To Enjoy The Idea Of Things More Than The Things Themselves.

I Wondered If The Life That Was Right For One Was Ever Right For Two!

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.

Artistic Growth Is, More Than It Is Anything Else, A Refining Of The Sense Of Truthfulness.

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.

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.

The Voice Is A Wild Thing. It Can't Be Bred In Captivity.

It Has Long Been A Tradition Among Novel Writers That A Book Must End By Everybody Getting Just What They Wanted, Or If The Conventional Happy Ending Was Impossible, Then It Must Be A Tragedy In Which One Or Both Should Die. In Real Life Very Few Of Us Get What We Want, Our Tragedies Don't Kill Us, But We Go On Living Them Year After Year, Carrying Them With Us Like A Scar On An Old Wound.

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.

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 She Had Lost, *but Whose Inner Glow Has Faded*. Whatever Else Was Gone, Antonia Had Not Lost The Fire Of Life.

Some Memories Are Realities, And Are Better Than Anything That Can Ever Happen To One Again.

One January Day, Thirty Years Ago, The Little Town Of Hanover, Anchored On A Windy Nebraska Tableland, Was Trying Not To Be Blown Away.

On The Farm The Weather Was The Great Fact, And Men's Affairs Went On Underneath It, As The Streams Creep Under The Ice.

I Tell You There Is Such A Thing As Creative Hate.

Men Are All Right For Friends, But As Soon As You Marry Them They Turn Into Cranky Old Fathers, Even The Wild Ones.

Wherever Humanity Has Made That Hardest Of All Starts And Lifted Itself Out Of Mere Brutality Is A Sacred Spot.

William Tavener Never Heeded Ominous Forecasts In The Domestic Horizon, And He Never Looked For A Storm Until It Broke.

There Are Only Two Or Three Human Stories, And They Go On Repeating Themselves As Fiercely As If They Had Never Happened Before.

In New Mexico, He Always Awoke A Young Man, Not Until He Arose And Began To Shave Did He Realize That He Was Growing Older. His First Consciousness Was A Sense Of The Light Dry Wind Blowing In Through The Windows, With The Fragrance Of Hot Sun And Sage-brush And Sweet Clover; A Wind That Made One's Body Feel Light And One's Heart Cry 'to-day, To-day,' Like A Child's.

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.

Miracles Surround Us At Every Turn If We But Sharpen Our Perceptions Of Them.

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.

Some Things Are Best Learned In Calm, Others In Storm.

Art And Religion (they Are The Same Thing, In The End, Of Course) Have Given Man The Only Happiness He Has Ever Had.

Oh, That's The Beauty Of The Rose, That It Blossoms And Dies.

To Note An Artist's Limitations Is But To Define His Talent.

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.

The Dead Might As Well Try To Speak To The Living As The Old To The Young.

"more Than Him Has Done That," Said Antonia Sadly, And The Girls Murmured Assent.

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.

He Domesticated And Developed The Native Wild Flowers. He Had One Hill-side Solidly Clad With That Low-growing Purple Verbena Which Mats Over The Hills Of New Mexico. It Was Like A Great Violet Velvet Mantle Thrown Down In The Sun; All The Shades That The Dyers And Weavers Of Italy And France Strove For Through Centuries, The Violet That Is Full Of Rose Colour And Is Yet Not Lavender; The Blue That Becomes Almost Pink And Then Retreats Again Into Sea-dark Purple—the True Episcopal Colour And Countless Variations Of It.

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.

Freedom So Often Means That One Isn't Needed Anywhere.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every Artist Makes Himself Born. It Is Very Much Harder Than The Other Time, And Longer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A Watch Is The Most Essential Part Of A Lecture.

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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