Explore Quotes by Willa Cather

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.

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.

Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.

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

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.

A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.

The 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.

What 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.

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.

When we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord.

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.

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

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.

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

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

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

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