Willa Cather Quotes

The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.

Money is a protection, a cloak; it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity.

People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.

If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago.

Too much information is rather deadening.

Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.

You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?

Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.

Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.

[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.

New things are always ugly.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent.

Happy people do a great deal for their friends.

The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.

The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.

A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.

In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.

Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.

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.

Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.

Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.

A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.

What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?

youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself betrayed.

The summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact of the world.

On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.

People always think the bread of another country is better than their own.

The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself.

Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.

If youth did not matter so much to itself, it would never have the heart to go on.

When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all.Willa Cather

Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.

The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual; those who were not have been long forgotten.

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.

Merely having seen the season change in a country gave one the sense of having been there for a long time.

Setting ... is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.

She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends.

I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.

A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

Pity is sworn servant unto love: And this be sure, wherever it begin To make the way, it lets your master in.

I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.

I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known her about ever since I could remember anything at all.

In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart.

From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.

The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.

All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.

The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.

One afternoon late in October of the year 1697, Euclide Auclair, the philosopher apothecary of Quebec, stood on the top of Cap Diamant gazing down the broad, empty river far beneath him.