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

Look at my papa here; he's been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him.

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.

From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted; and nobody knew why.

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.

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.

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