Willa Cather Quotes
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Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.
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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.
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So long as a novelist works selfishly for the pleasure of creating character and situation corresponding to his own illusions, ideals and intuitions, he will always produce something worth while and natural. Directly he takes himself too seriously and begins for the alleged benefit of humanity an elaborate dissection of complexes, he evolves a book that is more ridiculous and tiresome than the most conventional cold cream girl novel of yesterday.
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Money is a protection, a cloak; it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity.
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Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is.
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It is cremated youth. It is all yours--no one gave it to you.
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I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
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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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The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
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Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
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Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.
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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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The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.
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The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern.
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The great fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake. The sun rose out of it, the day began there; it was like an open door that nobody could shut. The land and all its dreariness could never close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you would soon be free.
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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
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The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.
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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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If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be.
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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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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 always think the bread of another country is better than their own.
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Many people seem to think that art is a luxury to be imported and tacked on to life. Art springs out of the very stuff that life is made of. Most of our young authors start to write a story and make a few observations from nature to add local color. The results are invariably false and hollow. Art must spring out of the fullness and richness of life.
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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.