Willa Cather Quotes
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People always think the bread of another country is better than their own.
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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.
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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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Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.
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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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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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The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.
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The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.
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Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
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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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I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
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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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Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
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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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Success is never so interesting as struggle
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A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.
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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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Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.
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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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What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?
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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.
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Oh, this is the joy of the rose; That it blows, And goes.
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Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.
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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.