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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.

— Willa Cather The Song of the Lark (1915)

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More quotes by Willa Cather

It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.

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.

O Pioneers! (1913)

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

O Pioneers! (1913)

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

O Pioneers! (1913)

No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.

Alexander's Bridge (1912)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Willa Cather (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.