Top 243 Quotes & Sayings by Willa Cather - Page 3

This is reality, whether you like it or not--all those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.

I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light and air abot me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would only be sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.

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.

On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.

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

I tell you there is such a thing as creative hate.

He had been to see Mrs. Erlich just before starting home for the holidays, and found her making German Christmas cakes. She took him into the kitchen and explained the almost holy traditions that governed this complicated cookery. Her excitement and seriousness as she beat and stirred were very pretty, Claude thought. She told off on her fingers the many ingredients, but he believed there were things she did not name: the fragrance of old friendships, the glow of early memories, belief in wonder-working rhymes and songs.

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

When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.

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.

youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself betrayed.

One realizes that 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. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works.

Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world

No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses.

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.

Of course Nebraska is a storehouse of literary material. Everywhere is a storehouse of literary material. If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see.

Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.

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.

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.

A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.

The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself.

If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.

Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.

It is cremated youth. It is all yours--no one gave it to you.

Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.

Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.

What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?

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

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

In great misfortunes, 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.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.

They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.

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

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

Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.

Merely having seen the season change in a country gave one the sense of having been there for a long time.

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.

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.

Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.

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.

He domesticated and developed the native wild flowers. He had one hill-side solidly clad with that low-growing purple verbena which mats over the hills of New Mexico. It was like a great violet velvet mantle thrown down in the sun; all the shades that the dyers and weavers of Italy and France strove for through centuries, the violet that is full of rose colour and is yet not lavender; the blue that becomes almost pink and then retreats again into sea-dark purple—the true Episcopal colour and countless variations of it.

Setting ... is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.

The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual; those who were not have been long forgotten.

Prayers said by good people are always good prayers

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.

Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.

I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.

Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there - that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.

In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way; but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded.

A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.

I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known her about ever since I could remember anything at all.

From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.

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.

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

Sometimes falling in love may look like pure madness to those not experiencing it but that's only because they're not involved. Just because other people don't understand your feelings doesn't mean they're not real or they're not important. You have to trust yourself. Feel what you feel and don't worry about anyone else. Love is about you and your significant other, remember that.

She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends.

In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart.

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.

Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?

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.