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Willa Cather

99 quotes

“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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1912 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Alexander's Bridge (1912) Ch. 8
“There's nothing so dangerous as sitting still. You've only got one life, one youth, and you can let it slip through your fingers if you want to; nothing easier. Most people do that.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1912 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Bohemian Girl (1912)
“It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Youth and the Bright Medusa, "A Gold Slipper" (1920)
“The world there was the flat world of the ancients; to the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak; to the west, a corral that reached to the sunset; between, the conquests of peace, dearer-bought than those of war.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Youth and the Bright Medusa, "A Wagner Matinee" (1920)
“The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1922 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: One of Ours (1922), Bk. II, Ch. 6
“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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1922 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: One of Ours (1922), Bk. II, Ch. 6
“Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1923 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Lost Lady (1923), Part I, Ch. 7
“My familiar spirit is like an old wild turkey that forsakes a feeding ground as soon as it sees tracks of people-especially if the people are readers, book-buyers. It's a crafty bird and it wants to go where there aint no readers That's the truth: they go and paw a place all up and spoil it for me. It isn't my secret anymore.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1924 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher (27 February 1924), published in The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (2013), edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout
“Directly under his feet was the French stronghold, — scattered spires and slated roofs flashing in the rich, autumnal sunlight; the little capital which was just then the subject of so much discussion in Europe, and the goal of so many fantastic dreams.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Shadows on the Rock (1931), Book I, Ch. 1
“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 (1873–1947) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Shadows on the Rock (1931), Book III, Ch. 5
“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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Shadows on the Rock (1931), Epilogue
“The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Alexandra drew her shawl closer about her and stood leaning against the frame of the mill, looking at the stars which glittered so keenly through the frosty autumn air. She always loved to watch them, to think of their vastness and distance, and of their ordered march. It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them, she felt a sense of personal security.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him... We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was about Alexandra something of the impervious calm of the fatalist, always disconcerting to very young people, who cannot feel that the heart lives at all unless it is still at the mercy of storms; unless its strings can scream to the touch of pain.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The years seemed to stretch before her like the land: spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning; the same pulling at the chain — until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I tell you there is no such thing as creative hate!”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The great pines stand at a considerable distance from each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks alone. They do not intrude 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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What was any art but an effort to make a sheath, 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 (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I keep my mind on it. That's the whole trick, in so far as stage experience goes; keeping right there every second. If I think of anything else for a flash, I'm gone, done for. But at the same time, one can take things in — with another part of your brain, maybe. It's different from what you get in study, more practical and conclusive. There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm. You learn the delivery of a part only before an audience.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice. But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Jim," she said earnestly, "if I was put down there in the middle of the night, I could find my way all over that little town; and along the river to the next town, where my grandmother lived. My feet remember all the little paths through the woods, and where the big roots stick out to trip you. I ain't never forgot my own country.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cleric said he thought Virgil, when he was dying at Brindisi, must have remembered that passage. After he had faced the bitter fact that he was to leave the 'Aeneid' unfinished, and had decreed that the great canvas, crowded with figures of gods and men, should be burned rather than survive him unperfected, then his mind must have gone back to the perfect utterance of the 'Georgics,' where the pen was fitted to the matter as the plough is to the furrow; and he must have said to himself, with the thankfulness of a good man, 'I was the first to bring the Muse into my country.'”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She remembered home as a place where there were always too many children, a cross man and work piling up around a sick woman.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The windy springs and the blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw. I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the modelling of human faces.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world. I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister — anything that a woman can be to a man. 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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ain't it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other?”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 to one again.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As I confronted her, the changes grew less apparent to me, her identity stronger. She was there, in the full vigour of her personality, battered but not diminished, looking at me, speaking to me in the husky, breathy voice I remembered so well.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“His misfortune was that he loved youth — he was weak to it, it kindled him. If there was one eager eye, one doubting, critical mind, one lively curiosity in a whole lecture-room full of commonplace boys and girls, he was its servant. That ardour could command him. It hadn't worn out with years, this responsiveness, any more than the magnetic currents wear out; it had nothing to do with Time.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source