Willa Cather Quotes
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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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Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
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[Some] people really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist on making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art; expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure, and distraction, and to contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less limited and less intense idealists.
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It is cremated youth. It is all yours--no one gave it to you.
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I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light and air abot me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would only be sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.
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Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone.
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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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Success is never so interesting as struggle
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One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.
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People always think the bread of another country is better than their own.
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Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
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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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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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A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.
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Oh, this is the joy of the rose; That it blows, And goes.
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What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?
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Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.
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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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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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Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar.
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Sometimes falling in love may look like pure madness to those not experiencing it but that's only because they're not involved. Just because other people don't understand your feelings doesn't mean they're not real or they're not important. You have to trust yourself. Feel what you feel and don't worry about anyone else. Love is about you and your significant other, remember that.
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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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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.