Willa Cather Quotes

226 Sourced Quotes

Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding.

Willa Cather
From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted; and nobody knew why.

Willa Cather
Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.

Willa Cather
One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.

Willa Cather
Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone.

Willa Cather
The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual; those who were not have been long forgotten.

Willa Cather
Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.

Willa Cather
The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.

Willa Cather
Many people seem to think that art is a luxury to be imported and tacked on to life. Art springs out of the very stuff that life is made of. Most of our young authors start to write a story and make a few observations from nature to add local color. The results are invariably false and hollow. Art must spring out of the fullness and richness of life.

Willa Cather
Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.

Willa Cather
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
The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.

Willa Cather
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
Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.

Willa Cather
When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.

Willa Cather
In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart.

Willa Cather
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
Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to
leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.

Willa Cather
People always think the bread of another country is better than their own.

Willa Cather
We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on cigar-box lids.

Willa Cather
The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it's exactly the sort you are not.

Willa Cather
How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!

Willa Cather
The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant on one's back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky.

Willa Cather
You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?

Willa Cather
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
Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.

Willa Cather
There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.

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

Willa Cather
He had the uneasy manner of a man who is not among his own kind, and who has not seen enough of the world to feel that all people are in some sense his own kind.

Willa Cather
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.

Willa Cather