Willa Cather Quotes
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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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One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.
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It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled.
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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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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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In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.
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I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now.
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Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness.
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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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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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Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.
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Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions of them.
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It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
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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.
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To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
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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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Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.
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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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The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
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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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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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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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The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech - it is a gift from heart to heart.
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Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.