Explore Quotes by Willa Cather

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world.

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.

No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

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

Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.

I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.

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

Where there is great love there are always miracles.

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

If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry

The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.

Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.

Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together.

When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all.Willa Cather

If 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.

I 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.