Willa Cather Quotes

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

[Some] people really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist on making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art; expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure, and distraction, and to contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less limited and less intense idealists.

Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.

They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.

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

In great misfortunes, people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love--if once one has ever fallen in.

Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand - a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods - or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

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.

There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.

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

It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies; our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?

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.

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

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

Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.

Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.

The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity.

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.

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

Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

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

Success is never so interesting as struggle

Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.

So long as a novelist works selfishly for the pleasure of creating character and situation corresponding to his own illusions, ideals and intuitions, he will always produce something worth while and natural. Directly he takes himself too seriously and begins for the alleged benefit of humanity an elaborate dissection of complexes, he evolves a book that is more ridiculous and tiresome than the most conventional cold cream girl novel of yesterday.

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

Sometimes falling in love may look like pure madness to those not experiencing it but that's only because they're not involved. Just because other people don't understand your feelings doesn't mean they're not real or they're not important. You have to trust yourself. Feel what you feel and don't worry about anyone else. Love is about you and your significant other, remember that.

The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.

Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine.

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

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

Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.

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.

The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.

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

The two friends stood for a few moments on the windy street corner, not speaking a word, as two travelers, who have lost their way, sometimes stand and admit their perplexity in silence. (O Pioneers!)

[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.

Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness.

Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions of them.

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.

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

When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.

There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.

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

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

Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.

I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.

Where there is great love there are always miracles.