Willa Cather Quotes
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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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It is cremated youth. It is all yours--no one gave it to you.
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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 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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When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all.Willa Cather
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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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Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.
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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
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The prayers of all good people are good.
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I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.
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Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
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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.
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Oh, this is the joy of the rose; That it blows, And goes.
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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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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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The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.
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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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When we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord.
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Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.
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The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
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The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.
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What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?
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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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A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.