Willa Cather citations (99 citations, Page 2)

Willa Cather: 99 citations0 J'aime

Willa Cather: Citations en anglais

“His misfortune was that he loved youth — he was weak to it, it kindled him. If there was one eager eye, one doubting, critical mind, one lively curiosity in a whole lecture-room full of commonplace boys and girls, he was its servant. That ardour could command him. It hadn't worn out with years, this responsiveness, any more than the magnetic currents wear out; it had nothing to do with Time.”

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Willa Cather livre The Professor's House

Book I, Ch. 1
The Professor's House (1925)

“Jim," she said earnestly, "if I was put down there in the middle of the night, I could find my way all over that little town; and along the river to the next town, where my grandmother lived. My feet remember all the little paths through the woods, and where the big roots stick out to trip you. I ain't never forgot my own country.”

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Willa Cather livre My Ántonia

Book II, Ch. 14
My Antonia (1918)

“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.”

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Willa Cather

Source: Willa Cather in Europe (1956), Ch. 5 (22 July 1902)

“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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Willa Cather

"Light on Adobe Walls"
Willa Cather on Writing (1949)

“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.”

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Willa Cather livre The Song of the Lark

Part II, Ch. 6
The Song of the Lark (1915)

“In New Mexico he always awoke a young man…Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up to him for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests… That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after his day. He did not know just when it had become so necessary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. 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!”

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Willa Cather livre Death Comes for the Archbishop

Book IX, Ch. 3
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)

“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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Willa Cather

Source: Willa Cather in Europe (1956), Ch. 4 (16 July 1902)

“Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding.”

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Willa Cather livre My Mortal Enemy

My Mortal Enemy (1926)

“The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”

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Willa Cather livre O Pioneers!

Part II, Ch. 4
O Pioneers! (1913)

“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.”

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Willa Cather

"Joseph and His Brothers"; first published in The Saturday Review of Literature (6 June 1936)
Not Under Forty (1936)

“I am sure I do not know why the beauty of Monte Carlo should not satisfy more than it does. The bluest of all seas is nowhere bluer than when you see it between the marble balustrades of the long white terrace before the casino, palms are nowhere greener than in that high garden which the mountain screen from every unkind breath, no colours could be more rich and various than those of the red and purple Alps that tower up behind the town, on whose summit such violent thunderstorms gather and break. But for me, at least, there was not at all the pleasure I had anticipated in this dazzling white and blue, these feathery palms and ragged Alps. …I had a continual restless feeling that there was nothing at all real about Monte Carlo; that the sea was too blue to be wet, the casino too white to be anything but pasteboard, and that from their very greenness the palms must be cotton. … in atmosphere and spirit the entire kingdom of Monaco is an extension of the casino.”

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Willa Cather

Source: Willa Cather in Europe (1956), Ch. 14 (16 September 1902)

“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.”

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Willa Cather

Katherine Mansfield (1925)

“"In great misfortunes," he told himself, "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 out, for him, seemed to mean falling out of all domestic and social relations, out of his place in the human family, indeed.”

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Willa Cather livre The Professor's House

Book III, Ch. 4
The Professor's House (1925)

“Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family — but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.”

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Willa Cather livre Shadows on the Rock

Shadows on the Rock (1931), Book III, Ch. 5

“I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now.”

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Willa Cather livre My Ántonia

Book 1, Ch. 17
My Antonia (1918)

“To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.”

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Willa Cather

"Miss Jewett"; originally published as the Preface to The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925)
Not Under Forty (1936)

“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.”

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Willa Cather livre My Ántonia

Book V, Ch. 1
My Antonia (1918)

“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.”

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Willa Cather livre O Pioneers!

Part V, Ch. 3
O Pioneers! (1913)

“Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said… was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?”

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Willa Cather livre A Lost Lady

A Lost Lady (1923), Part I, Ch. 7

“It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.”

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Willa Cather livre My Ántonia

Book V, Ch. 1
My Antonia (1918)

“To people off alone, as we were, there is something stirring about finding evidences of human labour and care in the soil of an empty country. It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel differently about the ground you walk over every day.”

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Willa Cather livre The Professor's House

Book II, Ch. 2
The Professor's House (1925)

“Ain't it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other?”

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Willa Cather livre My Ántonia

Bok IV, Ch. 4
My Antonia (1918)

“He had never learned to live without delight. And he would have to learn to, just as, in a Prohibition country, he supposed he would have to learn to live without sherry. Theoretically he knew that life is possible, maybe even pleasant, without joy, without passionate griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to live like that.”

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Willa Cather livre The Professor's House

Book III, Ch. 4
The Professor's House (1925)

“Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.”

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Willa Cather livre My Mortal Enemy

Part II, Ch. 1
My Mortal Enemy (1926)

“Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; 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.”

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Willa Cather

On the Art of Fiction"; originally published in The Borzoi 1920 (1920)
Willa Cather on Writing (1949)

“Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”

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Willa Cather livre My Ántonia

Book V, Ch. 3
My Antonia (1918)

“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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Willa Cather livre The Professor's House

Book I, Ch. 5
The Professor's House (1925)

“The windy springs and the blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw. I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the modelling of human faces.”

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Willa Cather livre My Ántonia

Book IV, Ch. 3
My Antonia (1918)

“Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.”

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Willa Cather livre The Professor's House

Book I, Ch. 1
The Professor's House (1925)

“What a thing it is to lie there all day in the fine breeze, with the pine needles dropping on one, only to return to the hotel at night so hungry that the dinner, however homely, is a fete, and the menu finer reading than the best poetry in the world! Yet we are to leave all this for the glare and blaze of Nice and Monte Carlo; which is proof enough that one cannot become really acclimated to happiness. (10 September 1902) in the village of Cavalaire, France.”

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Willa Cather

Source: Willa Cather in Europe (1956), Ch. 13

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