Willa Cather Quotes
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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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The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
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Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.
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Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.
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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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Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
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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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I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.
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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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There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
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There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
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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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Art, it seems to me, should simplify.
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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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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 prayers of all good people are good.
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There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
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The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me. In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions... I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen again.
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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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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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Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.
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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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Money is a protection, a cloak; it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity.