Willa Cather Quotes

Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.

The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.

Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.

No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.

In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.

Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.

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.

We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it - for a little while.

The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.

Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.

Some people's lives are affected by what happens to their person or their property; but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts -- that and nothing more.

Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.

There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.

I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!

Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world

I tell you there is such a thing as creative hate.

The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.

Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.

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.

Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.

A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.

The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern.

Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.

A burnt dog dreads the fire.

The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.

We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on cigar-box lids.

Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.

Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.

After all, the supreme virtue in all art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives art a right to be.

Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.

When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.

Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.

A soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.

Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man of taste who does not very often get to Boston.

There was a new kind of strength in the gravity of her face, and her colors still gave her that look of deep-seated health and ardor.

It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled.

One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify.

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.

Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.

Prayers said by good people are always good prayers

Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere.

Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?

How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!

It is cremated youth. It is all yours--no one gave it to you.

No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses.

Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?

One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.

Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is.

It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.