Willa Cather Quotes
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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.
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Personal hatred and family affection are not incompatible; they often flourish and grow strong together.
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Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.
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Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
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A burnt dog dreads the fire.
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
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Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions of them.
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Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.
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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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New things are always ugly.
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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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"More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.
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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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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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Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
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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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Some things are best learned in calm, others in storm.
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Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.
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It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled.
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People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.
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A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
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To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent.
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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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The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.