Willa Cather Quotes
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I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!
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Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.
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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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[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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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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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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For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.
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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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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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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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The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
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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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But she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions. It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.
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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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Too much information is rather deadening.
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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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How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!
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If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry
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Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
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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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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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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.
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A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.