89 Quotes & Sayings By Willa Cather

Willa Cather was a novelist, playwright, and short story writer. She is the author of twelve novels and is considered one of the most significant American writers of the twentieth century. One of her most important works is O Pioneers, which tells the story of a young immigrant girl and her family as they move to Nebraska and struggle to start a new life.

Where there is great love, there are always miracles.
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Where there is great love, there are always miracles. Willa Cather
Most of the basic material a writer works with is...
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Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen. Willa Cather
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Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years. Willa Cather
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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. Willa Cather
That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and...
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That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep. Willa Cather
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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. Willa Cather
I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest...
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I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people. Willa Cather
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One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me not to rest 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. Willa Cather
Religion is different from everything else because in religion seeking...
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Religion is different from everything else because in religion seeking is finding. Willa Cather
It's all very well to tell us to forgive our...
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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? Willa Cather
The fact that I was a girl never damaged my...
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The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor. Willa Cather
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What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, to strong to stop, too sweet to lose. Willa Cather
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It seems to me that the pleasure one feels in a work of art is just one thing that one does not have to explain. Willa Cather
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There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before. Willa Cather
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Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons. Willa Cather
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After that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only–spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind–rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring. Willa Cather
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I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin. There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows, full of fruit. I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines. The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground. There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. 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. Willa Cather
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I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody. Willa Cather
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I only knew the schoolbooks said he "died in the wilderness, of a broken heart."" More than him has done that, " said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent. Willa Cather
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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 in cheap materials. Willa Cather
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There was a basic harmony between Antonia and her mistress [Mrs. Harling]. They had strong, independent natures, both of them. They knew what they liked, and were not always trying to imitate other people. They loved children and animals and music, and rough play, and digging in the earth. They liked to prepare rich, hearty food and to see people eat it; to make up soft white beds and to see youngsters asleep in them. They ridiculed conceited people and were quick to help unfortunate ones. Deep down in each of them there was a kind of hearty joviality, a relish of life, not over-delicate, but very invigorating. I never tried to define it, but I was distinctly conscious of it. I could not imagine Antonia's living for a week in any other house in Black Hawk than the Harlings. . Willa Cather
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As he stood there lost in reflection, Auclair thought he seemed more like a man revolving plans for a new struggle with fortune than one looking back upon a life of brilliant features. The Count had the bearing of a fencer when he takes up the foil; from his shoulders to his heels there was intention and direction. His carriage was his unconscious idea of himself, -- it was an armour he put on when he took off his night-cap in the morning, and he wore it all day, at early mass, at his desk, on the march, at the Council, at his dinner-table. Even his enemies relied upon his strength. . Willa Cather
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I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered-- about her teeth, for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life. Willa Cather
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He is convinced that the people who might mean something to him will always misjudge him and pass him by. He is not so much afraid of loneliness as he is of accepting cheap substitutes; of making excuses to himself for a teacher who flatters him, of waking up some morning to find himself admiring a girl merely because she is accessible. He has a dread of easy compromises, and he is terribly afraid of being fooled. Willa Cather
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The land belongs to the future, Carl; that's the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk's plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. 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. Willa Cather
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He knew he would always remember her, standing there with that expectant, forward-looking smile, enough to turn the future into summer. Willa Cather
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Carl sat musing until the sun leaped above the prairie, and in the grass about him all the small creatures of day began to tune their tiny instruments. Birds and insects without number began to chirp, to twitter, to snap and whistle, to make all manner of fresh shrill noises. The pasture was flooded with light; every clump of ironweed and snow-on-the-mountain threw a long shadow, and the golden light seemed to be rippling through the curly grass like the tide racing in. Willa Cather
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He used to say that he never felt the hardness of the human struggle or the sadness of history as he felt it among those ruins. He used to say, too, that it made one feel an obligation to do one's best. Willa Cather
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He had never got so much back for himself from any pupil as he did from Miss Kronborg. From the first she had stimulated him; something in her personality invariably affected him. Now that he was feeling his way toward her voice, he found her more interesting than ever before. She lifted the tedium of the winter for him, gave him curious fancies and reveries. Musically, she was sympathetic to him. Why this was true, he never asked himself. He had learned that one must take where and when one can the mysterious mental irritant that rouses one's imagination; that it is not to be had by order. She often wearied him, but she never bored him. Willa Cather
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O Sacred Heart of Mary! " she murmured by his side, and he felt how that name was food and raiment, friend and mother to her. He received the miracle in her heart into his own, saw through her eyes, knew that his poverty was as bleak as hers. When the Kingdom of Heaven had first come into the world, into a cruel world of torture and slaves and masters, He who brought it had said, "And whosoever is least among you, the same shall be first in the Kingdom of Heaven. Willa Cather
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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. Willa Cather
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Constant comparisons are the stamp of the foreigner; one continually translates manners and customs of a new country into terms of his own, before he can fully comprehend them. Willa Cather
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And I advise ye to think well, he told her It's better to be a stray dog in this world than a man without money. I've tried it both ways, and I know. A poor man stinks, and God hates him. Willa Cather
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I suppose 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 that one can never please the people they wanted to please. Willa Cather
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Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer. Willa Cather
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The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing – desire. Willa Cather
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But writing is a queer business. If one does anything that is sharp and keep enough to go over the line, to get itself with the work that is taken seriously, one has to have had either an unusual knowledge of or a peculiar sympathy with the characters one handles. One can’t write about what one most admires always–you must, by some accident, have seen into your character very deeply, and it is this accident of intense realization of him that give your writing about him tone and distinction, that lifts it above the commonplace, in other words . Willa Cather
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It's by understanding me, and the boys, and mother, that you have helped me. I expect that is the only way one person ever really can help another. Willa Cather
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As in most families, the mere struggle to have anything of one's own, to be one's self at all, creates an element of strain that keeps everybody almost at the breaking point. Willa Cather
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Either a building is part of a place or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger. Willa Cather
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Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again. Willa Cather
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As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass. Willa Cather
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However much they may smile at her, the old inhabitants would miss Tillie. Her stories give them something to talk about and to conjecture about, cut off as they are from the restless currents of the world. The many naked little sandbars which lie between Venice and the mainland, in the seemingly stagnant water of the lagoons, are made habitable and wholesome only because, every night, a foot and a half of tide creeps in from the sea and winds its fresh brine up through all that network of shining waterways. So, into all the little settlements of quiet people, tidings of what their boys and girls are doing in the world bring real refreshment; bring to the old, memories, and to the young, dreams. . Willa Cather
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Cavenaugh rubbed his hands together and smiled his sunny smile.' I like that idea. It's reassuring. If we can have no secrets, it means we can't, after all, go so far afield as we might, ' he hesitated, 'yes, as we might.' Eastman looked at him sourly. 'Cavenaugh, when you've practiced law in New York for twelve years, you find that people can't go far in any direction, except-' He thrust his forefinger sharply at the floor.' Even in that direction, few people can do anything out of the ordinary. Our range is limited. Skip a few baths, and we become personally objectionable. The slightest carelessness can rot a man's integrity or give him ptomaine poisoning. We keep up only be incessant cleansing operations, of mind and body. What we call character, is held together by all sorts of tacks and strings and glue. ("Consequences"). Willa Cather
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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. Willa Cather
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Miracles... seem to me to rest not so much upon... healing power coming suddenly near us from afar but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that, for a moment, our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there around us always. Willa Cather
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While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said. Willa Cather
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Miracles surround us at every turn, if we but sharpen our perceptions to them. Willa Cather
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A crimson fire that vanquishes the stars; A pungent odor from the dusty sage; A sudden stirring of the huddled herds; A breaking of the distant table-lands Through purple mists ascending, and the flare Of water ditches silver in the light; A swift, bright lance hurled low across the world; A sudden sickness for the hills of home. Willa Cather
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Sometimes, " I ventured, "it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty.. . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her... Willa Cather
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If words had cost money, Tom couldn't have used them more sparingly. The adjectives were purely descriptive, relating to form and colour, and were used to present the objects under consideration, not the young explorer's emotions. Yet through this austerity one felt the kindling imagination, the ardour and excitement of the boy, like the vibration in a voice when the speaker strives to conceal his emotion by using only the conventional phrases. Willa Cather
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Prayers said by good people are always good prayers Willa Cather
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The old man smiled. 'I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived. Willa Cather
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At nine o'clock Mr. Shimerda lighted one of our lanterns and put on his overcoat and fur collar. He stood in the little entry hall, the lantern and his fur cap under his arm, shaking hands with us. When he took grandmother's hand, he bent over it as he always did, and said slowly, 'Good woman! ' He made the sign of the cross over me, put on his cap and went off in the dark. As we turned back to the sitting-room, grandfather looked at me searchingly. 'The prayers of all good people are good, ' he said quietly. Willa Cather
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Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry, aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert. . Willa Cather
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I slept that night in the room I used to have when I was a little boy, with the summer wind blowing in at the windows, bringing the smell of the ripe fields. I lay awake and watched the moonlight shining over the barn and the stacks and the pond, and the windmill making its old dark shadow against the blue sky. Willa Cather
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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. Willa Cather
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I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his outbursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication. How often have I seen him draw his dark brows together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in the carpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his brain. Willa Cather
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Bouchalka was not a reflective person. He had his own idea of what a great prima donna should be like, and he took it for granted that Mme. Garnet corresponded to his conception. The curious thing was that he managed to impress his idea upon Cressida herself. She began to see herself as he saw her, to try to be like the notion of her that he carried everywhere in that pointed head of his. She was exalted quite beyond herself. Things that had been chilled under the grind came to life in her that winter, with the breath of Bouchalka’s adoration. Then, if ever in her life, she heard the bird sing on the branch outside her window; and she wished she were younger, lovelier, freer. She wished there were no Poppas, no Horace, no Garnets. She longed to be only the bewitching creature Bouchalka imagined her. . Willa Cather
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Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. Willa Cather
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The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter song, as if it said" "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." It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer. . Willa Cather
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Most beautiful of all was the tarnished gold of the elms, with a little brown in it, a little bronze, a little blue, even-- a blue like amethyst, which made them melt into the azure haze with a kind of happiness, a harmony of mood that filled the air with content. Willa Cather
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Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing. Willa Cather
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person. Willa Cather
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Don't you feel that at this rate there isn't much in it? In what? In living at all, going on as we do. What do we get out of it? Take a day like this: you waken up in the morning and you're glad to be alive; it's a good enough day for anything, and you feel sure something will happen. Well, whether it's a workday or a holiday, it's all the same in the end. At night you go to bed - nothing has happened. . Willa Cather
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I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. Willa Cather
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There are some things you learn best in calm and some in storm. Willa Cather
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There is only one big thing-desire. And before it when it is big all is little. Willa Cather
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I tell you there is no such thing as creative hate! Willa Cather
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Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything. Willa Cather
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The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor. Willa Cather
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That is happiness: to be dissolved into something completely great. Willa Cather
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Where there is great love there are always wishes. Willa Cather
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I am enjoying to a full that period of reflection which is the happiest conclusion to a life of action. Willa Cather
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No one can builu her security upon the nobleness of another person. Willa Cather
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Art it seems to me should simplify. Willa Cather
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In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever. Willa Cather
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Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again. Willa Cather
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Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness. Willa Cather
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I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived. Willa Cather
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That is happiness to be dissolved into something complete and great. Willa Cather
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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
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Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything. Willa Cather
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Where there is great love, there are always wishes. Willa Cather
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There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm. Willa Cather
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The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is. Willa Cather
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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. Willa Cather
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The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own. Willa Cather