Willa Cather - The Song of the Lark (1915)

21 Sourced Quotes

View all Willa Cather Quotes
She would take any amount of trouble to avoid trouble.

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

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
One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.

Willa Cather
Every artist makes himself born.... Your mother did not bring anything into the world to play piano. That you must bring into the world yourself.

Willa Cather
All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.

Willa Cather
Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Willa Cather
A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.

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

Willa Cather
Her secret? It is every artist's secret: passion. That is all. It is an open secret, and perfectly safe. Like heroism, it is inimitable to cheap materials.

Willa Cather
When we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord.

Willa Cather
If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.

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

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
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
What was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself — life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?

Willa Cather
The great pines stand at a considerable distance from each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks alone. They do not intrude upon each other. The Navajos are not much in the habit of giving or of asking help. Their language is not a communicative one, and they never attempt an interchange of personality in speech. Over their forests there is the same inexorable reserve. Each tree has its exalted power to bear.

Willa Cather
I keep my mind on it. That's the whole trick, in so far as stage experience goes; keeping right there every second. If I think of anything else for a flash, I'm gone, done for. But at the same time, one can take things in — with another part of your brain, maybe. It's different from what you get in study, more practical and conclusive. There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm. You learn the delivery of a part only before an audience.

Willa Cather
Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.

Willa Cather