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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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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Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.
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Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.
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People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.
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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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The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it's exactly the sort you are not.
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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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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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The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.
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I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!
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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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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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I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now.
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In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance; from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities.
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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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From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted; and nobody knew why.
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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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The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
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Pity is sworn servant unto love: And this be sure, wherever it begin To make the way, it lets your master in.
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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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Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.
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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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The end is nothing; the road is all.