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Willa Cather

99 quotes

“A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To people off alone, as we were, there is something stirring about finding evidences of human labour and care in the soil of an empty country. It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel differently about the ground you walk over every day.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had never learned to live without delight. And he would have to learn to, just as, in a Prohibition country, he supposed he would have to learn to live without sherry. Theoretically he knew that life is possible, maybe even pleasant, without joy, without passionate griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to live like that.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In great misfortunes," he told himself, "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." Falling out, for him, seemed to mean falling out of all domestic and social relations, out of his place in the human family, indeed.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour's household, and, underneath, another — secret and passionate and intense — which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now everything was in ruins. The air was still and cold like the air in a refrigerating-room. What I felt was fear; I was afraid to look or speak or move. Everything about me seemed evil. 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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know. We were... A man and woman draw apart from that long embrace, and see what they have done to each other... In age we lose everything; even the power to love.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I could bear to suffer... so many have suffered. But why must it be like this? I have not deserved it. I have been true in friendship; I have faithfully nursed others in sickness... Why must I die like this, alone with my mortal enemy?”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Where there is great love there are always miracles.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, — and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one's feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Father Latour judged that, just as it was the white man's way to assert himself in any landscape, to change it, make it over a little (at least to leave some mark of memorial of his sojourn), it was the Indian's way to pass through a country without disturbing anything; to pass and leave no trace, like fish through the water, or birds through the air. It was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it. The Hopi villages that were set upon rock mesas were made to look like the rock on which they sat, were imperceptible at a distance.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1922 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Novel Démeublé"; originally published in The New Republic (1922)
“The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a popular superstition that "realism" asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. But is not realism, more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer toward his material, a vague indication of the sympathy and candour with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme?”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Miss Jewett"; originally published as the Preface to The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925)
“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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live; and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac's own estimate, one has lived in vain.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1933 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Chance Meeting"; first published in The Atlantic Monthly (1933)
“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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Joseph and His Brothers"; first published in The Saturday Review of Literature (6 June 1936)
“Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole — so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the Art of Fiction"; originally published in The Borzoi 1920 (1920)
“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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On the Art of Fiction" (1920)
“Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Four Letters: Escapism" first published in Commonweal (17 April 1936)
Also quoted by: Nathaniel Hawthorne (misattributed)
“The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Four Letters: Escapism" (1936)
“Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Four Letters: Escapism" (1936)
“Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Four Letters: Escapism" (1936)
“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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1902 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 4 (16 July 1902)
“If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don't care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1902 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 5 (22 July 1902)
“We were at last in Monte Cristo's country, fairly into the country of the fabulous, where extravagance ceases to exist because everything is extravagant, and where the wildest dreams come true.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1902 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 12 (6 September 1902) near Marseilles, France.
“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, as to fortune or fame.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1902 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 13 (10 September 1902)
“What a thing it is to lie there all day in the fine breeze, with the pine needles dropping on one, only to return to the hotel at night so hungry that the dinner, however homely, is a fete, and the menu finer reading than the best poetry in the world! Yet we are to leave all this for the glare and blaze of Nice and Monte Carlo; which is proof enough that one cannot become really acclimated to happiness. (10 September 1902) in the village of Cavalaire, France.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (16 September 1902)”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the buffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story. This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed, — these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces, — and this would always be his.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1923 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Lost Lady (1923), Part II, Ch. 9
“Perhaps I am like Carrie Jensen, the sister of one of my hired men. She had never been out of the cornfields, and a few years ago she got despondent and said life was just the same thing over and over, and she didn't see the use of it. After she had tried to kill herself once or twice, her folks got worried and sent her over to Iowa to visit some relations. Ever since she's come back she's been perfectly cheerful, and she says she's contented to live and work in a world that's so big and interesting. She said that anything as big as the bridges over the Platte and the Missouri reconciled her. And it's what goes on in the world that reconciles me.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“On starlight nights I used to pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little, sleeping houses on either side, with their storm-windows and covered back porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe. Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. 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.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share — black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world. In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In New Mexico he always awoke a young man...Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up to him 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... That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long after his day. He did not know just when it had become so necessary to him, but he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning, into the morning!”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One might say that 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. A quality which one can remember without the volume at hand, can experience over and over again in the mind but can never absolutely define, as one can experience in memory a melody, or the summer perfume of a garden... It is a common fallacy that a writer, if he is talented enough, can achieve this poignant quality by improving upon his subject-matter, by using his "imagination" upon it and twisting it to suit his purpose. The truth is that by such a process (which is not imaginative at all!) he can at best produce only a brilliant sham, which, like a badly built and pretentious house, looks poor and shabby after a few years. If he 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. The artist spends a lifetime in pursuing the things that haunt him, in having his mind "teased" by them, in trying to get these conceptions down on paper exactly as they are to him and not in conventional poses supposed to reveal their character; trying this method and that, as a painter tries different lightings and different attitudes with his subject to catch the one that presents it more suggestively than any other. And at the end of a lifetime he emerges with much that is more or less happy experimenting, and comparatively little that is the very flower of himself and his genius.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) said by 1947 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am sure I do not know why the beauty of Monte Carlo should not satisfy more than it does. The bluest of all seas is nowhere bluer than when you see it between the marble balustrades of the long white terrace before the casino, palms are nowhere greener than in that high garden which the mountain screen from every unkind breath, no colours could be more rich and various than those of the red and purple Alps that tower up behind the town, on whose summit such violent thunderstorms gather and break. But for me, at least, there was not at all the pleasure I had anticipated in this dazzling white and blue, these feathery palms and ragged Alps. ...I had a continual restless feeling that there was nothing at all real about Monte Carlo; that the sea was too blue to be wet, the casino too white to be anything but pasteboard, and that from their very greenness the palms must be cotton. … in atmosphere and spirit the entire kingdom of Monaco is an extension of the casino.”
Willa Cather (1873–1947) first seen 1902 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Ch. 14 (16 September 1902)