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Willa Cather citations
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Wilella Sibert Cather, née le 7 décembre 1873 à Winchester, dans l'État de Virginie, et morte le 24 avril 1947 à New York, est une romancière américaine. Wikipedia  

✵ 7. décembre 1873 – 24. avril 1947
Willa Cather photo
Willa Cather: 99   citations 0   J'aime

Willa Cather: Citations en anglais

“The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.”

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Willa Cather livre The Professor's House

Book I, Ch. 8
The Professor's House (1925)

“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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Willa Cather

"The Novel Démeublé"; originally published in The New Republic (1922)
Not Under Forty (1936)

“We were at last in Monte Cristo's country, fairly into the country of the fabulous, where extravagance ceases to exist because everything is extravagant, and where the wildest dreams come true.”

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Willa Cather

Source: Willa Cather in Europe (1956), Ch. 12 (6 September 1902) near Marseilles, France.

“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?”

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Willa Cather

"The Novel Démeublé"
Not Under Forty (1936)

“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.”

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Willa Cather

Katherine Mansfield (1925)

“Directly under his feet was the French stronghold, — scattered spires and slated roofs flashing in the rich, autumnal sunlight; the little capital which was just then the subject of so much discussion in Europe, and the goal of so many fantastic dreams.”

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Willa Cather livre Shadows on the Rock

Shadows on the Rock (1931), Book I, Ch. 1

“One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days, as to fortune or fame.”

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Willa Cather

Source: Willa Cather in Europe (1956), Ch. 13 (10 September 1902)

“She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.”

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Willa Cather livre O Pioneers!

Part I, Ch. 5
O Pioneers! (1913)

“There was about Alexandra something of the impervious calm of the fatalist, always disconcerting to very young people, who cannot feel that the heart lives at all unless it is still at the mercy of storms; unless its strings can scream to the touch of pain.”

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Willa Cather livre O Pioneers!

Part IV, Chapter 1 : "The White Mulberry Tree"
O Pioneers! (1913)

“There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share — black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.”

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Willa Cather livre My Ántonia

Book II, Ch. 14
My Antonia (1918)

“Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.”

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Willa Cather livre O Pioneers!

Part I, Ch. 2
O Pioneers! (1913)

“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.”

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Willa Cather livre My Ántonia

Book III, Ch. 4
My Antonia (1918)

“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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Willa Cather

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

“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.”

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Willa Cather livre The Professor's House

Book I, Ch. 1
The Professor's thoughts on Lake Michigan
The Professor's House (1925)

“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.”

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Willa Cather livre The Song of the Lark

Part VI, Ch. 2
The Song of the Lark (1915)

“She remembered home as a place where there were always too many children, a cross man and work piling up around a sick woman.”

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Willa Cather livre My Ántonia

Book III, Ch. 4
My Antonia (1918)

“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.”

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Willa Cather livre The Song of the Lark

Part I, Ch. 11
The Song of the Lark (1915)

“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.”

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Willa Cather One of Ours

One of Ours (1922), Bk. II, Ch. 6

“As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world.
In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.”

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Willa Cather livre My Ántonia

Book IV, Ch. 4
My Antonia (1918)

“The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.”

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Willa Cather

"Four Letters: Escapism" (1936)
Willa Cather on Writing (1949)

“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.”

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Willa Cather

"A Chance Meeting"; first published in The Atlantic Monthly (1933)
Not Under Forty (1936)

“Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.”

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Willa Cather

"Four Letters: Escapism" first published in Commonweal (17 April 1936)
Willa Cather on Writing (1949)

“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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Willa Cather livre Youth and the Bright Medusa

Youth and the Bright Medusa, "A Gold Slipper" (1920)

“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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Willa Cather livre The Song of the Lark

Part VI, Ch. 9
The Song of the Lark (1915)

“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 to one again.”

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Willa Cather livre My Ántonia

Book V, Ch. 1
My Antonia (1918)

“I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world. I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister — anything that a woman can be to a man. 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.”

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Willa Cather livre My Ántonia

Book IV, Ch. 4
My Antonia (1918)

“People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know. We were… A man and woman draw apart from that long embrace, and see what they have done to each other… In age we lose everything; even the power to love.”

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Willa Cather livre My Mortal Enemy

Part II, Ch. 4
My Mortal Enemy (1926)

“I tell you there is no such thing as creative hate!”

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Willa Cather livre The Song of the Lark

Part I, Ch. 9
The Song of the Lark (1915)

“Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.”

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Willa Cather

"Four Letters: Escapism" (1936)
Willa Cather on Writing (1949)

“There's nothing so dangerous as sitting still. You've only got one life, one youth, and you can let it slip through your fingers if you want to; nothing easier. Most people do that.”

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Willa Cather livre The Bohemian Girl

The Bohemian Girl (1912)

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