Top 100 Willa Cather Quotes
#1. In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.
Willa Cather
#2. Because he talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull from constant use.
Willa Cather
#3. You must pray for him, my child. It is to such as he that our Blessed Mother comes nearest.
Willa Cather
#4. Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?
Willa Cather
#5. That was the first time I ever saw Anton Jelinek.
Willa Cather
#6. She was like someone in whom the faculty of becoming interested is worn out.
Willa Cather
#7. Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.
Willa Cather
#8. It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies; our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?
Willa Cather
#9. Of course Nebraska is a storehouse of literary material. Everywhere is a storehouse of literary material. If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see.
Willa Cather
#10. Poor soul, poor soul!' grandmother groaned. 'I'd like to think
Willa Cather
#11. Be generous with yourself. Don't stop short of splendid things.
Willa Cather
#12. Merely having seen the season change in a country gave one the sense of having been there for a long time.
Willa Cather
#13. what unprotected faces they were; their very roughness and violence made them defenseless. These boys had no practiced manner behind which they could retreat and hold people at a distance.
Willa Cather
#14. Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
Willa Cather
#15. A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.
Willa Cather
#16. I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication.
Willa Cather
#17. If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.
Willa Cather
#18. Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
Willa Cather
#19. No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
Willa Cather
#20. The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer; it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.
Willa Cather
#21. There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
Willa Cather
#22. It seems to me that the pleasure one feels in a work of art is just one thing that one does not have to explain.
Willa Cather
#23. The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.
Willa Cather
#24. prayed for the poor and destitute in great cities, where the struggle for life was harder than it was here with us.
Willa Cather
#25. He knew he would always remember her, standing there with that expectant, forward-looking smile, enough to turn the future into summer.
Willa Cather
#26. One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.
Willa Cather
#27. I tell you there is such a thing as creative hate.
Willa Cather
#28. As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.
Willa Cather
#29. She took off her jacket and sat more at ease in her blouse, of some soft, flimsy silk.
Willa Cather
#30. Her secret? It is every artist's secret
passion. That is all. It is an open secret, and perfectly safe. Like heroism, it is inimitable in cheap materials.
Willa Cather
#31. People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.
Willa Cather
#32. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
Willa Cather
#33. The old man smiled. 'I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.
Willa Cather
#34. This land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces.
Willa Cather
#35. The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.
Willa Cather
#36. She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends.
Willa Cather
#37. Where there is great love, there are always miracles.
Willa Cather
#38. Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.
Willa Cather
#39. It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.
Willa Cather
#40. Imagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on - a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation.
Willa Cather
#43. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge.
Willa Cather
#44. 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 happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.
Willa Cather
#45. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.
Willa Cather
#46. Some things are best learned in calm, others in storm.
Willa Cather
#47. Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.
Willa Cather
#48. She was quick to anger, quick to laughter, and jolly from the depths of her soul.
Willa Cather
#49. Miracles surround us at every turn, if we but sharpen our perceptions to them.
Willa Cather
#50. Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.
Willa Cather
#51. If youth did not matter so much to itself, it would never have the heart to go on.
Willa Cather
#52. The grudge was fundamental. Perhaps he could not have given it up if he tried. Perhaps he got more satisfaction out of feeling himself abused that he would have got out of being loved.
Willa Cather
#53. The feeling that he was near the conclusion of his life was an instinctive conviction, such as we have when we waken in the dark and know at once that it is near morning; or when we are walking across the country and suddenly know that we are near the sea. Letters came every week
Willa Cather
#54. One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.
Willa Cather
#55. I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.
Willa Cather
#56. Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man of taste who does not very often get to Boston.
Willa Cather
#57. The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
Willa Cather
#58. Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.
Willa Cather
#59. The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.
Willa Cather
#60. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last.
Willa Cather
#61. I never get tired of them old stars, Thee. I miss 'em up in Washington and Oregon where it's misty. Like 'em best down in Mother Mexico, where they have everything their own way. I'm not for any country where the stars are dim.
Willa Cather
#62. The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he noticed, their red glory all over.
Willa Cather
#63. Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.
Willa Cather
#64. 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. And before it, when it is big, all is little.
Willa Cather
#65. Have the last word ma'm," he said cheerfully, "It's a lady's priviledge.
Willa Cather
#66. Most beautiful of all was the tarnished gold of the elms, with a little brown in it, a little bronze, a little blue, even
a blue like amethyst, which made them melt into the azure haze with a kind of happiness, a harmony of mood that filled the air with content.
Willa Cather
#67. But she's the kind that won't be downed easily. She'll work all day and go to a Bohemian wedding and dance all night, and drive the hay wagon for a cross man next morning.
Willa Cather
#68. Don't love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you. Oh, dear boy, pray that whatever your sacrifice may be, it be not that.
Willa Cather
#69. [Dawn] is always such a forgiving time. When that first cold, bright streak comes over the water, it's as if all our sins were pardoned; as if the sky leaned over the earth and kissed it and gave it absolution.
Willa Cather
#70. To be sure, the Bishop was a little theatrical in his humility, as he had been in his grandeur; but that was his way, Auclair reflected, and, after all, nobody can help his way. If a man admits his mistakes, that is a great deal ...
Willa Cather
#71. 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.
Willa Cather
#72. Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
Willa Cather
#73. I only knew the schoolbooks said he "died in the wilderness, of a broken heart."
"More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.
Willa Cather
#75. To fulfil the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.
Willa Cather
#76. It's not a pleasant place to be lying while the world is moving and doing and bettering... but it rather seems as though we ought to go back to the place we came from in the end.
Willa Cather
#77. Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.
Willa Cather
#78. But I can't help feeling scared when I think how I will miss you- more than you will ever know.
Willa Cather
#79. Even after I had pounded his ugly head flat, his body kept on coiling and winding, doubling and falling back on itself.
Willa Cather
#80. the miracle happened; one of those quiet moments that clutch the heart, and take more courage than the noisy, excited passages in life.
Willa Cather
#81. No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses.
Willa Cather
#82. I know that I am going away on my own account. I must make the usual effort. I must have something to show for myself. To take what you would give me, I should have to be either a very large man or a very small one, and I am only in the middle class.
Willa Cather
#83. The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing - desire.
Willa Cather
#84. I believed devoutly in her power to fascinate him, in her dazzling loveliness. I believed her young, ardent, reckless, disillusioned, under sentence, feverish, avid of pleasure.
Willa Cather
#85. It's awfully easy to rush into a profession you don't really like, and awfully hard to get out of it.
Willa Cather
#86. If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry
Willa Cather
#87. An artist's saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.
Willa Cather
#88. When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.
Willa Cather
#89. What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
Willa Cather
#90. Look at my papa here; he's been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him.
Willa Cather
#91. There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.
Willa Cather
#92. My dear," he sighed when the lights were turned on and they both looked older, "it's been a mistake, our having a family and writing histories and getting middle-aged. We should have been picturesquely shipwrecked together when we were young.
Willa Cather
#93. 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.
Willa Cather
#94. As long as there is one house there must be one hand.
Willa Cather
#95. I shall do nothing to discourage my patient, Monseigneur, any more than I shall bleed him, as many good people urge me to do. The mind, too, has a kind of blood; in common speech we call it hope.
Willa Cather
#96. She had seen it when she was at home last summer - the hostility of comfortable, self-satisfied people toward serious effort.
Willa Cather
#97. There are times when one's vitality is too high to be clouded, too elastic to stay down.
Willa Cather
#98. From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.
Willa Cather
#99. Then you do not believe in progress?" "Change is not always progress, Monseigneur.
Willa Cather
#100. Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife
beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.
Willa Cather
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