Willa Cather Quotes
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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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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
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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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I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.
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I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known her about ever since I could remember anything at all.
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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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I suppose there were moonless nights and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, but I remember them all as flooded with the rich indolence of a full moon.
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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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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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Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
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People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.
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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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A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.
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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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People always think the bread of another country is better than their own.
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Oh, this is the joy of the rose; That it blows, And goes.
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Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is.
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Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.
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No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses.
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The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
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What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?
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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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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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Imagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on — a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation.