Willa Cather Quotes
-
I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!
-
I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered –about her teeth for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things she had lost, *but whose inner glow has faded*. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.
-
A burnt dog dreads the fire.
-
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.
-
New things are always ugly.
-
Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
-
Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.
-
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.
-
The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
-
Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.
-
Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.
-
A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
-
The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.
-
"More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.
-
People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.
-
It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled.
-
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.
-
The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
-
Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.