Willa Cather Quotes
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I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.
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Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.
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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.
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Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.
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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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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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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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There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
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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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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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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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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 miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.
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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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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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Every artist knows that there is no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion.