Willa Cather Quotes
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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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In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.
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Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
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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.
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Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?
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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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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
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Look at my papa here; he's been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him.
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Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere.
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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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Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions of them.
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Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.
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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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The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
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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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I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!
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Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.
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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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I have not much faith in women in fiction.... Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
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The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
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Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.
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Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
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Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.