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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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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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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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People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.
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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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People are always talking about the joys of youth — but, oh, how youth can suffer!
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In time they quarrelled, of course, and about an abstraction — as young people often do, as mature people almost never do.
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The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing—desire. And before it, when it is big, all is little.
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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. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him... We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.
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Now everything was in ruins. The air was still and cold like the air in a refrigerating-room. What I felt was fear; I was afraid to look or speak or move. Everything about me seemed evil. 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.
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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.
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The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.
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Quote of the day
About one-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.
Robert F. Kennedy
Willa Cather
Creative Commons
Born:
December 7, 1873
Died:
April 24, 1947
(aged 73)
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