Willa Cather Quotes
-
We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it - for a little while.
-
This is reality, whether you like it or not--all those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.
-
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.
-
Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.
-
Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?
-
youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself betrayed.
-
William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.
-
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?
-
The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.
-
A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.
-
Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.
-
Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.
-
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
-
The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.
-
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.
-
The prayers of all good people are good.
-
The summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact of the world.
-
Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.
-
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.
-
The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.
-
It is cremated youth. It is all yours--no one gave it to you.
-
People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.
-
The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.
-
It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies; our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?