Willa Cather's Quotes

#1. Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

Willa Cather

#2. I can't altogether tell myself, Lillian. It's not wholly a matter of the calendar. It's the feeling that I've put a great deal behind me, where I can't go back to it again - and I don't really wish to go back. The way would be too long and too fatiguing.

Willa Cather

#3. During those last weeks of the Bishop's life he thought very little about death; it was the Past he was leaving. The future would take care of itself.

Willa Cather

#4. The spark in his eye, which is one's very self, caught the spark in hers that was herself, and for a moment they looked into each other's natures.

Willa Cather

#5. A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.

Willa Cather

#6. Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.

Willa Cather

#7. The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it's exactly the sort you are not.

Willa Cather

#8. 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

#9. You feel that, properly, Alexandra's house is the big-out-of-doors, and that it is in the soil that she expresses herself.
-O Pioneers

Willa Cather

#10. One is best in one's own country.

Willa Cather

#11. Oh, he's an old friend from the West," said Eden easily. "I won't introduce you, because he doesn't like people. He's a recluse. Good-bye.

Willa Cather

#12. She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true ... she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things.

Willa Cather

#13. Thackeray's a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was an extremely good writer and Willa Cather was a great artist.

Truman Capote

#14. The test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.

Willa Cather

#15. Grandfather's farm sometime before daybreak, after

Willa Cather

#16. Nebraska was home to indigenous peoples for centuries. It became a state in 1867, and has produced an important literary figure, Willa Cather, as well as an investor said to be the world's second richest man, Warren Buffett.

Stephen Kinzer

#17. 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

#18. One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.

Willa Cather

#19. He used to say that he never felt the hardness of the human struggle or the sadness of history as he felt it among those ruins. He used to say, too, that it made one feel an obligation to do one's best.

Willa Cather

#20. How easy it would be to dream one's life out in some cleft in the world.

Willa Cather

#21. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is.

Willa Cather

#22. And I advise ye to think well, he told her It's better to be a stray dog in this world than a man without money. I've tried it both ways, and I know. A poor man stinks, and God hates him.

Willa Cather

#23. He looked up quietly. "You know, don't you, Thee, that I think you are just the finest thing I've struck in this world?"
The tears ran down Thea's cheeks. "You're too good to me, Ray. You're a lot too good to me," she faltered.

Willa Cather

#24. The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant on one's back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky.

Willa Cather

#25. The truth is, it is enough to live in this country. Just to live. Work isn't necessary for the salvation of the soul.

Willa Cather

#26. 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

#27. And that's what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own individual lives.

Willa Cather

#28. 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

#29. There are times when one's vitality is too high to be clouded, too elastic to stay down.

Willa Cather

#30. Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.

Willa Cather

#31. He's made himself a rabbit-skin cap, Jim, and a rabbit-skin collar that he buttons on outside his coat. They ain't got but one overcoat among 'em over there, and they take turns wearing it. They seem awful scared of cold, and stick in that hole in the bank like badgers.

Willa Cather

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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.

Willa Cather

#35. To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Willa Cather

#36. An artist's saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.

Willa Cather

#37. It's awfully easy to rush into a profession you don't really like, and awfully hard to get out of it.

Willa Cather

#38. 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

#39. The summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact of the world.

Willa Cather

#40. It's by understanding me, and the boys, and mother, that you have helped me. I expect that is the only way one person ever really can help another.

Willa Cather

#41. That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero's death - heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day. How

Willa Cather

#42. [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

#43. A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.

Willa Cather

#44. Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness.

Willa Cather

#45. You can't tell me anything about family life. I've had plenty to last me.' 'But it's not all like that,' I objected. 'Near enough. It's all being under somebody's thumb.

Willa Cather

#46. It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled.

Willa Cather

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. Have the last word ma'm," he said cheerfully, "It's a lady's priviledge.

Willa Cather

#50. 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

#51. What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, to strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

Willa Cather

#52. ...Now did you ever hear of a young feller's having such hard luck, Mrs. Burden?"

Grandma told him she was sure the Lord had remembered these things to his credit, and had helped him out of many a scrape when he didn't realize that he was being protected by Providence.

Willa Cather

#53. Constant comparisons are the stamp of the foreigner; one continually translates manners and customs of a new country into terms of his own, before he can fully comprehend them.

Willa Cather

#54. People always think the bread of another country is better than their own.

Willa Cather

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

Willa Cather

#56. She began to wonder whether she would not do better to finish her life alone. What was left of life seemed unimportant.

Willa Cather

#57. I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.

Willa Cather

#58. In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.

Willa Cather

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

Willa Cather

#60. She was like someone in whom the faculty of becoming interested is worn out.

Willa Cather

#61. The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like a bush that burned with fire and was not consumed.

Willa Cather

#62. Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.

Willa Cather

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

Willa Cather

#64. 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

#65. That was the first time I ever saw Anton Jelinek.

Willa Cather

#66. Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

Willa Cather

#67. Alexandra sighed. I have a feeling that if you go away, you will not come back. Something will happen to one of us, or to both. People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find. What I have is yours, if you care enough about me to take it.

Willa Cather

#68. Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?

Willa Cather

#69. You must pray for him, my child. It is to such as he that our Blessed Mother comes nearest.

Willa Cather

#70. Some people's lives are affected by what happens to their person or property, but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts
that and nothing more.

Willa Cather

#71. There is no God but one God and Art is his revealer; that's my creed and I'll follow it to the end, to a hotter place than Pittsburgh if need be.

Willa Cather

#72. Because he talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull from constant use.

Willa Cather

#73. I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known her about ever since I could remember anything at all.

Willa Cather

#74. The children you don't especially need, you have always with you, like the poor. But the bright ones get away from you. They have their own way to make in the world. Seems like the brighter they are, the farther they go.

Willa Cather

#75. The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.

Willa Cather

#76. As far as we could see, the miles of copper red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of day

Willa Cather

#77. 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

#78. About us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see her face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest, realest face, under all the shadows of women's faces, at the very bottom of my memory. "I'll

Willa Cather

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping ... Alone,

Willa Cather

#82. Some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm. - Willa Cather

Zoraida Cordova

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. Her rapid footsteps shook her own floors, and she routed lassitude and indifference wherever she came.

Willa Cather

#87. Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar.

Willa Cather

#88. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

Willa Cather

#89. In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.

Willa Cather

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

Willa Cather

#91. Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding.

Willa Cather

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

Willa Cather

#93. In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way; but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded.

Willa Cather

#94. Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.

Willa Cather

#95. It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.

Willa Cather

#96. Be generous with yourself. Don't stop short of splendid things.

Willa Cather

#97. . . . she had always the power of suggesting things much lovelier than herself, as the perfume of a single flower may call up the whole sweetness of spring.

Willa Cather

#98. Poor soul, poor soul!' grandmother groaned. 'I'd like to think

Willa Cather

#99. The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.

Willa Cather

#100. 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