Willa Cather Quotes
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Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding.
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Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.
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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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Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
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Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.
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There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
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life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
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Art, it seems to me, should simplify.
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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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When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.
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The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
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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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Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
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One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days.
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Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.
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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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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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The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.
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Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.
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There is a popular superstition that "realism" asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. But is not realism, more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer toward his material, a vague indication of the sympathy and candour with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme?
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Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine.
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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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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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The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.