Willa Cather Quotes
-
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.
-
A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.
-
Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.
-
Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.
-
The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.
-
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.
-
The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.
-
There was a new kind of strength in the gravity of her face, and her colors still gave her that look of deep-seated health and ardor.
-
Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
-
The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
-
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.
-
People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.
-
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.
-
Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
-
Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
-
What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
-
[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.
-
No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
-
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.
-
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.
-
One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.
-
She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last.
-
In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.
-
Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?