Willa Cather Quotes
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Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.
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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.
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I tell you there is such a thing as creative hate.
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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.
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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.
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Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there - that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.
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I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off.
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In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.
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Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.
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An artist's saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.
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If youth did not matter so much to itself, it would never have the heart to go on.
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There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
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The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity.
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There was only - spring itself, the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere; in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm high wind - rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive ... If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring.
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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.
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In great misfortunes, people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love – if once one has ever fallen in.
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Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.
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Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.
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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.
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In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart.
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The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
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Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding.
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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.
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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.