Willa Cather

An artist's saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.

Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.

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.

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.

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.

There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back.

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

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.

After all, the supreme virtue in all art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives art a right to be.

Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.

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.

I suppose there were moonless nights and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, but I remember them all as flooded with the rich indolence of a full moon.

It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled.

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

Oh, this is the joy of the rose;_x000D_ _x000D_ That it blows,_x000D_ _x000D_ And goes.

Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar.

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.

The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.

Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.

Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.