Willa Cather - People Quotes

37 Sourced Quotes

View all Willa Cather Quotes
Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

Willa Cather
No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person. Two people, when they love each other, grow alike in their tastes and habits and pride, but their moral natures (whatever we may mean by that canting expression) are never welded. The base one goes on being base, and the noble one noble, to the end.

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

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

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
"In great misfortunes," he told himself, "people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love — if once one has ever fallen in."
Falling out, for him, seemed to mean falling out of all domestic and social relations, out of his place in the human family, indeed.

Willa Cather
The test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.

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
He didn't believe she would ever be guilty of those uncatalogued faint treacheries which vanity makes young people commit.

Willa Cather
Ah, she thought, that's what liking people amounts to; it's liking their silliness and absurdities. That's what it really is.

Willa Cather
Some peoples' lives are affected by what happens to their person or their property; but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts — that and nothing more.

Willa Cather
The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern.

Willa Cather
People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.

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

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

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
The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.

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

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
Nothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.

Willa Cather
Alexandra sighed. "I have a feeling that if you go away, you will not come back. Something will happen to one of us, or to both. People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find. What I have is yours if you care enough about me to take it.

Willa Cather
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
We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it — for a little while.

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

Willa Cather
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

Willa Cather
There's nothing so dangerous as sitting still. You've only got one life, one youth, and you can let it slip through your fingers if you want to; nothing easier. Most people do that.

Willa Cather
To people off alone, as we were, there is something stirring about finding evidences of human labour and care in the soil of an empty country. It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel differently about the ground you walk over every day.

Willa Cather
Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness.

Willa Cather