Willa Cather - People Quotes

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People are always talking about the joys of youth — but, oh, how youth can suffer!

Willa Cather
In time they quarrelled, of course, and about an abstraction — as young people often do, as mature people almost never do.

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

Willa Cather