quotes by Willa Cather

"Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen."
— Willa Cather

"Where there is great love, there are always miracles. "
— Willa Cather

"There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm."
— Willa Cather

""What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, to strong to stop, too sweet to lose.""
— Willa Cather

"And now the old story has begun to write itself over there," said Carl softly. "Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years."
— Willa Cather (O Pioneers!)

"Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet."
— Willa Cather

"That is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great.
"
— Willa Cather

"I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off."
— Willa Cather (O Pioneers!)

"The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own. "
— Willa Cather

""I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.""
— Willa Cather

"People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface. "
— Willa Cather (The Song of the Lark)

"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."
— Willa Cather (My Antonia)

"I 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 Cather (My Antonia)

"I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow."
— Willa Cather (My Antonia)

"She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends."
— Willa Cather

"The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern."
— Willa Cather

""Sometimes," I ventured, "it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her..."
— Willa Cather (My Antonia)

"The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young. "
— Willa Cather

"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..."
— Willa Cather

"The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer; it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic."
— Willa Cather

"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."
— Willa Cather

"No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person."
— Willa Cather

"Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things."
— Willa Cather (Death Comes for the Archbishop)

"The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers...I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep."
— Willa Cather (My Antonia)

"Yet 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 Cather

"I've seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too ful of life and love. They can't help it. Poeple come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter."
— Willa Cather (O Pioneers)

"He domesticated and developed the native wild flowers. He had one hill-side solidly clad with that low-growing purple verbena which mats over the hills of New Mexico. It was like a great violet velvet mantle thrown down in the sun; all the shades that the dyers and weavers of Italy and France strove for through centuries, the violet that is full of rose colour and is yet not lavender; the blue that becomes almost pink and then retreats again into sea-dark purple—the true Episcopal colour and countless variations of it."
— Willa Cather (Death Comes for the Archbishop)

"Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past."
— Willa Cather (My Antonia)

"There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share—black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun."
— Willa Cather (My Antonia)

"There are only two or three human stores, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before."
— Willa Cather

"Her eye, her ear, were tuning forks, burning glasses, which caught the minutest refraction or echo of a thought or feeling .... She heard a deeper vibration, a kind of composite echo, of all that the writer said, and did not say."
— Willa Cather

"

"The 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 Cather

"One realizes that even in harmonious families there is thisthis double life: the group life, which is the one wewe can observe in our neighbour’s household, and, underneath, another – secret andand passionate and intense – which is the real life that stamps thethe faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping,escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his ownown affections have woven about him. 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 relationshipsrelationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there areare innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern ofof our lives day by day . . . "
— Willa Cather

"We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever took we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, that exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theaters. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder."
— Willa Cather (O Pioneers!)

"The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor. "
— Willa Cather

"What was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mold in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself."
— Willa Cather

"The land belongs to the future."
— Willa Cather (O Pioneers)

"I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!"
— Willa Cather

"Doctrine is well enough for the wise, Jean; but the miracle is something we can hold in our hands and love."
— Willa Cather

"For ever and anon he soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning."
— Willa Cather

"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!)"
— Willa Cather

"You are the only beautiful thing that has ever come close to me. You came line an angel out of the sky. You are like the music you sing, you are like the stars and the snow on the mountains where I played when I was a little boy. You are like all tha they have killed in me. I die for you tonight, tomorrrow, for all eternity. I am not a cowaqrd; I was afraid cause I lovey ou more than Christ who died for me, more than I am afraid of hell, or hope for heaven. I was never afraid before."
— Willa Cather

"Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear
ourselves! Until then we have not lived."
— Willa Cather