-
A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
Willa Cather -
The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life.
Willa Cather
-
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.
Willa Cather -
Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.
Willa Cather -
Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.
Willa Cather -
Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.
Willa Cather -
Pity is sworn servant unto love: And this be sure, wherever it begin To make the way, it lets your master in.
Willa Cather -
Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.
Willa Cather
-
All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.
Willa Cather -
Look at my papa here; he's been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him.
Willa Cather -
When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.
Willa Cather -
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.
Willa Cather -
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.
Willa Cather -
The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself.
Willa Cather
-
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.
Willa Cather -
People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.
Willa Cather -
[Dawn] is always such a forgiving time. When that first cold, bright streak comes over the water, it's as if all our sins were pardoned; as if the sky leaned over the earth and kissed it and gave it absolution.
Willa Cather -
The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
Willa Cather -
Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.
Willa Cather -
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.
Willa Cather
-
Personal hatred and family affection are not incompatible; they often flourish and grow strong together.
Willa Cather -
The great pines stand at a considerable distance from each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks alone. They do notintrude upon each other. The Navajos are not much in the habit of giving or of asking help. Their language is not a communicative one, and they never attempt an interchange of personality in speech. Over their forests there is the same inexorable reserve. Each tree has its exalted power to bear.
Willa Cather -
Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone.
Willa Cather -
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.
Willa Cather