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Time Quotes by Willa Cather

39 Time quotes by Willa Cather

All Time quotes Willa Cather’s page

A flagstaff made from bones shows how time can turn the ordinary into something symbolic. Willa notes that when kindness disappears, people become wary, and she reminds us that lovers and enemies can exist together. She also mentions that miracles feel like sharper perception, not sudden magic.

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

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The land belongs to the future.

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People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.

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

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Merely having seen the season change in a country gave one the sense of having been there for a long time.

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Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.

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“There were other times when she was so shattered by ideas that she could do nothing worth while; when they trampled over…

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“Miracles... seem to me to rest not so much upon... healing power coming suddenly near us from afar but upon our perceptions…

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“what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining,…

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[Dawn] is always such a forgiving time. When that first cold, bright streak comes over the water, it's as if all our…

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“What was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mold in which to imprison for a moment the shining,…

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“The spark in his eye, which is one's very self, caught the spark in hers that was herself, and for a moment…

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Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the…

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From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into…

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“since I’ve been away, I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world. I’d have…

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“The land belongs to the future, Carl; that's the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county…

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“I was thinking", he answered absently, "about Euripides; how, when he was an old man, he went and lived in a cave…

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“Do you know, Àntonia, since I've been away, I think of you more often than of any one else in this part…

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“I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister--anything a woman can be…

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The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly…

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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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The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times…

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“One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe…

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“The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to…

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One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego…

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But she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or…

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“Antonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade - that grew stronger with time. In…

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“In those days, even in European countries, death had a solemn social importance. It was not regarded as a moment when certain…

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From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his…

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“His ideas about the future would not crystallize; the more he tried to think about it, the vaguer his conception if it…

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Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious,…

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“What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying…

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“‎The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundereds of times…

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Setting ... is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time…

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What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself…

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If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you…

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“He knew he would always remember her, standing there with that expectant, forward-looking smile, enough to turn the future into summer.”

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Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't…

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Ugly accidents happen . . . always have and always will. But the failures are swept back into the pile and forgotten.…

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More by Willa Cather

The end is nothing; the road is all.

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

Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.

“I only knew the schoolbooks said he "died in the wilderness, of a broken heart." "More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly,…

“Have the last word ma'm," he said cheerfully. "It's a lady's privilege.”

"More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.

Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.

“Money and office and success are the consolations of impotence. Fortune turns kind to such solid people and lets them suck their bone in…

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…

“You remember how homesick I used to get, and what long talks we used to have coming from school? We've someway always felt alike…

“He placed this book in my grandmother's hands, looked at her entreatingly, and said, with an earnestness which I shall never forget, "Te-e-ach, te-e-ach…

The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.

One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half…

Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.

“Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never…