Willa cather quotes

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.

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.

Ugly accidents happen . . . always have and always will. But the failures are swept back into the pile and forgotten. They don`t leave any lasting scar in the world, and they don`t affect the future. The things that last are the good things. The people who forge ahead and do something, they really count.

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

The land belongs to the future.

Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.

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.

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

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

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

Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.

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.

Imagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on — a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation.

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.

The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity.

In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.

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.

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

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

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

[Some] people really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist on making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art; expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure, and distraction, and to contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less limited and less intense idealists.

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

life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

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.

After all, the supreme virtue in all art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives art a right to be.

To fulfil the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of 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.

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

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

The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me. In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions... I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen again.

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.

For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.

It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.

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

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

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.

Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.

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.

Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.

The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.

Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.

The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.

[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.

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

Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.

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.

One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days.

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

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.

Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand - a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods - or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.

Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.

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.

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

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

Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.

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

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

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

The end is nothing; the road is all.

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.

Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.

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

Every artist knows that there is no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion.

If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be.

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

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

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

Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.

The air and the earth interpenetrated in the warm gusts of spring; the soil was full of sunlight, and the sunlight full of red dust. The air one breathed was saturated with earthy smells, and the grass under foot had a reflection of the blue sky in it.

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

The great pines stand at a considerable distance from each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks alone. They do notintrude 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.

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

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

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

If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago.

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off.

A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.

There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back.

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

Some things are best learned in calm, others in storm.

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.

Success is never so interesting as struggle

Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.

The great fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake. The sun rose out of it, the day began there; it was like an open door that nobody could shut. The land and all its dreariness could never close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you would soon be free.

I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!

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.

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

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

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

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

All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.

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?

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

Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.

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

The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer; it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.

Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?

Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.

Some people's 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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or if the conventional happy ending was impossible, then it must be a tragedy in which one or both should die. In real life very few of us get what we want, our tragedies don't kill us, but we go on living them year after year, carrying them with us like a scar on an old wound.

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.

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

People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.

Look at my papa here; he's been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him.

The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech - it is a gift from heart to heart.

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.

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.

Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.

Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.

Where there is great love there are always miracles.

People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.

Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.

What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?

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.

There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.

Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar.

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