Willa Cather Quotes
Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.
The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.
Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.
The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
The test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
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.
The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer; it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.
Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar.
When we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord.
One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days.
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
To fulfil the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.
I suppose there were moonless nights and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, but I remember them all as flooded with the rich indolence of a full moon.
Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.
People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.
People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.
The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant on one's back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky.
The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.
There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.
A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.
Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.
The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.