Willa Cather Quotes

It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.

Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.

The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

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

Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.

He had been to see Mrs. Erlich just before starting home for the holidays, and found her making German Christmas cakes. She took him into the kitchen and explained the almost holy traditions that governed this complicated cookery. Her excitement and seriousness as she beat and stirred were very pretty, Claude thought. She told off on her fingers the many ingredients, but he believed there were things she did not name: the fragrance of old friendships, the glow of early memories, belief in wonder-working rhymes and songs.

The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.

Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.

Prayers said by good people are always good prayers

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

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

To fulfil the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.

"More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.

Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.

But she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. 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. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions. It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.

Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.

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.

One realizes that 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. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works.

William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.

This is reality, whether you like it or not--all those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.

Of course Nebraska is a storehouse of literary material. Everywhere is a storehouse of literary material. If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see.

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

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

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