Willa Cather Quotes

226 Sourced Quotes

The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing—desire. And before it, when it is big, all is little.

Willa Cather
He loved youth — he was weak to it, it kindled him. If there was one eager eye, one doubting, critical mind, one lively curiosity in a whole lecture-room full of commonplace boys and girls, he was its servant. That ardor could command him.

Willa Cather
Every good 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
The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.

Willa Cather
There is a popular superstition that "realism" asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. But is not realism, more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer toward his material, a vague indication of the sympathy and candour with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme?

Willa Cather
The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.

Willa Cather
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.

Willa Cather
Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him... We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.

Willa Cather
She remembered home as a place where there were always too many children, a cross man and work piling up around a sick woman.

Willa Cather
To fulfil the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.

Willa Cather
The summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact of the world.

Willa Cather
Money? Oh yes, he would like to have some, but not what went with it.

Willa Cather
It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.

Willa Cather
Thea was still under the belief that public opinion could be placated; that if you clucked often enough, the hens would mistake you for one of themselves.

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

Willa Cather
Now everything was in ruins. The air was still and cold like the air in a refrigerating-room. What I felt was fear; I was afraid to look or speak or move. Everything about me seemed evil. When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.

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

Willa Cather
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
Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.

Willa Cather
Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness — why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?

Willa Cather
July came on with that breathless, brilliant heat which makes the plains of Kansas and Nebraska the best corn country in the world. It seemed as if we could hear the corn growing in the night; under the stars one caught a faint cracking in the dewy, heavy odoured cornfields where the feathered stalks stood so juicy and green.

Willa Cather
Theoretically he knew that life is possible, may be even pleasant, without joy, without passionate griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to live like that.

Willa Cather
The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer; it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.

Willa Cather
Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange!

Willa Cather
Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world

Willa Cather
Setting... is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.

Willa Cather
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.

Willa Cather
Ain't it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other?

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

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

Willa Cather