Willa Cather Quotes
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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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When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.
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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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Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.
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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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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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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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Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
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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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The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
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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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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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Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?
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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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Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.
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I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!
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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.
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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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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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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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The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.
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The end is nothing; the road is all.
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It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled.
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Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.