Top 243 Quotes & Sayings by Willa Cather

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

Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.

What was any art but 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.

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.

Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.

The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world.

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.

A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.

Where there is great love, there are always wishes.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

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

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.

The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.

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.

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.

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

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.

The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

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.

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.

The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.

Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.

I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.

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.

I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.

The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life.

Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions of them.

It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies; our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?

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.

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

The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.

When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.

Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.

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

Success is never so interesting as struggle

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.

There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.

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.

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.

Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.

[Dawn] is always such a forgiving time. When that first cold, bright streak comes over the water, it's as if all our sins were pardoned; as if the sky leaned over the earth and kissed it and gave it absolution.

It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.

Where there is great love there are always miracles.

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.

Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere.

Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together.

The end is nothing; the road is all.

The land belongs to the future.

Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.