Willa Cather Quotes
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Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.
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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.
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Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.
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I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.
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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 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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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.
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Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.
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There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
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Money is a protection, a cloak; it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity.
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Some people's lives are affected by what happens to their person or their property; but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts -- that and nothing more.
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Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
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Ugly accidents happen . . . always have and always will. But the failures are swept back into the pile and forgotten. They don`t leave any lasting scar in the world, and they don`t affect the future. The things that last are the good things. The people who forge ahead and do something, they really count.
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Art, it seems to me, should simplify.
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Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand - a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods - or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.
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A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.
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Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.
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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.
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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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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.
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The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.
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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.
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There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.
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I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. 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. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.