Willa Cather Quotes - Page 5

Quotes about:

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

  Willa Cather

  Friendship, Men, Joy

  Willa Cather (1938). “The novels and stories of Willa Cather ...”

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• 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

  Girl, Summer, Country

  Willa Cather (2013). “The Best of Willa Cather”, p.583, Simon and Schuster

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• [Some] people really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist on making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art; expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure, and distraction, and to contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less limited and less intense idealists.

  Willa Cather

  Art, Passion, Exercise

  Willa Cather (2013). “The Essential Willa Cather Collection”, p.331, eBookIt.com

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• In New Mexico, he always awoke a young man, not until he arose and began to shave did he realize that he was growing older. His first consciousness was a sense of the light dry wind blowing in through the windows, with the fragrance of hot sun and sage-brush and sweet clover; a wind that made one's body feel light and one's heart cry 'To-day, to-day,' like a child's.

  Willa Cather

  Love, Sweet, Children

  Willa Cather (2008). “Death Comes for the Archbishop”, p.293, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago.

  Willa Cather

  Writing, Years, Perfect

  Willa Cather (1970). “Collected Short Fiction, 1892-1912”, p.24, U of Nebraska Press

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• The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech - it is a gift from heart to heart.

  Willa Cather

  Notebook, Attitude, Heart

  Willa Cather (1988). “Not Under Forty”, p.83, U of Nebraska Press

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• Money is a protection, a cloak; it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity.

  Willa Cather

  Dignity, Quiet, Protection

  Willa Cather (2011). “My Mortal Enemy”, p.57, Vintage

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• 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.

  Willa Cather

  Unique, Voice, Mind

  1936 Not Under Forty, 'Miss Jewett'.

  17 Copy quote

• Ugly accidents happen . . . always have and always will. But the failures are swept back into the pile and forgotten. They don`t leave any lasting scar in the world, and they don`t affect the future. The things that last are the good things. The people who forge ahead and do something, they really count.

  Willa Cather

  People, World, Ugly

  Willa Cather (2012). “The Song of the Lark”, p.91, Courier Corporation

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• 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

  Beautiful, Life And Love, Winter

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Willa Cather

  Animal, Energy, World

  Willa Cather (2013). “One of Ours”, p.116, Courier Corporation

  19 Copy quote

• There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.

  Willa Cather

  Country, Land, Creeks

  Willa Cather (2012). “My Ántonia”, p.15, Courier Corporation

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• A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.

  Willa Cather

  Essentials, Watches, Lectures

  Willa Cather (1990). “Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Letters”, p.160, U of Nebraska Press

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• Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.

  Willa Cather

  Book, Writing, Kind

  Willa Cather (1954). “My Antonia”

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• 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.

  Willa Cather

  Running, Sweet, Art

  Willa Cather (2013). “The Best of Willa Cather”, p.375, Simon and Schuster

  26 Copy quote

• The great pines stand at a considerable distance from each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks alone. They do notintrude upon each other. The Navajos are not much in the habit of giving or of asking help. Their language is not a communicative one, and they never attempt an interchange of personality in speech. Over their forests there is the same inexorable reserve. Each tree has its exalted power to bear.

  Willa Cather

  Distance, Thinking, Giving

  Willa Cather (2012). “The Song of the Lark”, p.189, Courier Corporation

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• No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses.

  Willa Cather

  Art, Cooking, Made

  Willa Cather (1990). “Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Letters”, p.146, U of Nebraska Press

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• 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

  Thinking, Tree, Way

  O Pioneers! pt. 2, ch. 8 (1913)

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

  Willa Cather

  Suffering, Divine, Knows

  Willa Cather (2010). “Vintage Cather”, p.174, Vintage

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• Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.

  Willa Cather

  Writing, Office, World

  Willa Cather (1970). “Collected Short Fiction, 1892-1912”, p.24, U of Nebraska Press

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

  Willa Cather

  Hands, Quality, Intimate

  1927 Death Comes to the Archbishop, bk.1, ch.3.

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• Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.

  Willa Cather

  Art, Believe, Eye

  Willa Cather (1988). “Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art”, p.125, U of Nebraska Press

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• For ever and anon the 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

  Strong, Lying, Winning

  Willa Cather (2000). “The Troll Garden: Short Stories”, p.18, U of Nebraska Press

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• Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.

  Willa Cather

  Thinking, Skeletons, Blood

  Willa Cather (1938). “The Novels and Stories of Willa Cather ...”

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• Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.

  Willa Cather

  Humanity, Brutality, Sacred

  Willa Cather (2002). “The Professor's House”, p.220, U of Nebraska Press

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