Willa Cather Quotes
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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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Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person. Two people, when they love each other, grow alike in their tastes and habits and pride, but their moral natures (whatever we may mean by that canting expression) are never welded. The base one goes on being base, and the noble one noble, to the end.
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Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.
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Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
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Success is never so interesting as struggle
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A soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.
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Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.
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Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere.
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Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
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Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.
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Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions of them.
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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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In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.
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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.
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To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent.
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Personal hatred and family affection are not incompatible; they often flourish and grow strong together.
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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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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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Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.
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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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If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! “A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.
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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.