Willa Cather Quotes
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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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What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?
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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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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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People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.
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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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Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.
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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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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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Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.
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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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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.
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Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
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The prayers of all good people are good.
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The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer; it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.
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The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.
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We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on cigar-box lids.
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The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
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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.
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Setting ... is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.
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It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
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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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If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don't care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.