Willa Cather Quotes
-
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.
-
[Mark Twain] is still the rough, awkward, good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands when he was three years old. Thoroughly likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters.
-
Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.
-
The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
-
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.
-
There was a new kind of strength in the gravity of her face, and her colors still gave her that look of deep-seated health and ardor.
-
New things are always ugly.
-
Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.
-
A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
-
He had been to see Mrs. Erlich just before starting home for the holidays, and found her making German Christmas cakes. She took him into the kitchen and explained the almost holy traditions that governed this complicated cookery. Her excitement and seriousness as she beat and stirred were very pretty, Claude thought. She told off on her fingers the many ingredients, but he believed there were things she did not name: the fragrance of old friendships, the glow of early memories, belief in wonder-working rhymes and songs.
-
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.
-
"More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.
-
Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.
-
Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.
-
The end is nothing; the road is all.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
-
Pity is sworn servant unto love: And this be sure, wherever it begin To make the way, it lets your master in.
-
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.
-
Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.
-
That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.
-
People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.