Willa Cather Quotes
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If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago.
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One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.
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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
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Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.
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They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.
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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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Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.
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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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Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.
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When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.
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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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What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?
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It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or if the conventional happy ending was impossible, then it must be a tragedy in which one or both should die. In real life very few of us get what we want, our tragedies don't kill us, but we go on living them year after year, carrying them with us like a scar on an old wound.
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Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.
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All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.
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Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.
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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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All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.
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A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.
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Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.
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It is a tragic hour, that hour when we are finally driven to reckon with ourselves, when every avenue of mental distraction has been cut off and our own life and all its ineffaceable failures closes about us like the walls of that old torture chamber of the Inquisition.
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Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
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Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.