Willa Cather Quotes

226 Sourced Quotes

The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.

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
The world there was the flat world of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak; to the west, a corral that reached to the sunset; between, the conquests of peace, dearer-bought than those of war.

Willa Cather
If youth did not matter so much to itself it would never have the heart to go on.

Willa Cather
William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.

Willa Cather
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.

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

Willa Cather
One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.

Willa Cather
Imagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on — a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation.

Willa Cather
"More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.

Willa Cather
It is a tragic hour, that hour when we are finally driven to reckon with ourselves, when every avenue of mental distraction has been cut off and our own life and all its ineffaceable failures closes about us like the walls of that old torture chamber of the Inquisition.

Willa Cather
Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.

Willa Cather
The forest stretched no living man knew how far.

Willa Cather
Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man of taste who does not very often get to Boston.

Willa Cather
The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.

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

Willa Cather
A soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Willa Cather