Willa Cather Quotes
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Oh, this is the joy of the rose; That it blows, And goes.
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The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.
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Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.
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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.
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I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.
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Sometimes," I ventured, "it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her.
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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 summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact of the world.
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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.
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In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.
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One afternoon late in October of the year 1697, Euclide Auclair, the philosopher apothecary of Quebec, stood on the top of Cap Diamant gazing down the broad, empty river far beneath him.
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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
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The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant on one's back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky.
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People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.
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Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together.
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It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live; and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac's own estimate, one has lived in vain.
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Money is a protection, a cloak; it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity.
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In New Mexico, he always awoke a young man, not until he arose and began to shave did he realize that he was growing older. His first consciousness was a sense of the light dry wind blowing in through the windows, with the fragrance of hot sun and sage-brush and sweet clover; a wind that made one's body feel light and one's heart cry 'To-day, to-day,' like a child's.
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People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.
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All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.
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From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.
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After all, the supreme virtue in all art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives art a right to be.
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Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
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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.