Willa Cather Quotes
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[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.
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I've seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too ful of life and love. They can't help it. Poeple come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter.
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One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works.
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There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back.
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The land belongs to the future.
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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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Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.
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The two friends stood for a few moments on the windy street corner, not speaking a word, as two travelers, who have lost their way, sometimes stand and admit their perplexity in silence. (O Pioneers!)
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Too much information is rather deadening.
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Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.
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She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends.
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Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.
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The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
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Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.
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You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?
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Thea was still under the belief that public opinion could be placated; that if you clucked often enough, the hens would mistake you for one of themselves.
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Alexandra sighed. "I have a feeling that if you go away, you will not come back. Something will happen to one of us, or to both. People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find. What I have is yours if you care enough about me to take it.
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If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry
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I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.
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Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
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How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!
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A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.
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Prayers said by good people are always good prayers
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Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.