Willa Cather's Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Where there is great love, there are always wishes.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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