There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.
Willa CatherYou must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?
Willa CatherA pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.
Willa CatherThe air and the earth interpenetrated in the warm gusts of spring; the soil was full of sunlight, and the sunlight full of red dust. The air one breathed was saturated with earthy smells, and the grass under foot had a reflection of the blue sky in it.
Willa CatherI have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication.
Willa CatherIn a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance; from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities.
Willa CatherI wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light and air abot me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would only be sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.
Willa CatherYet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
Willa CatherNothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.
Willa CatherIf we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be.
Willa CatherThe 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.
Willa CatherOnly solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.
Willa CatherOne 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.
Willa CatherThere are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
Willa CatherAll Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.
Willa CatherClaude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.
Willa CatherAh! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.
Willa CatherArt and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.
Willa CatherWherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.
Willa CatherArtistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.
Willa CatherThis land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces.
Willa CatherIn other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way; but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded.
Willa CatherA 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.
Willa CatherImagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on — a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation.
Willa CatherThe idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me. In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions... I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen again.
Willa CatherThe sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.
Willa CatherLook 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.
Willa CatherThe 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.
Willa CatherWhat 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.
Willa CatherUgly accidents happen . . . always have and always will. But the failures are swept back into the pile and forgotten. They don`t leave any lasting scar in the world, and they don`t affect the future. The things that last are the good things. The people who forge ahead and do something, they really count.
Willa Cather