Willa Cather quotes - page 5

Some things are best learned in calm, others in storm. (Willa Cather)
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. View quote
Willa Cather
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. It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious. View quote
Willa Cather
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. View quote
Willa Cather
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. View quote
Willa Cather
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. View quote
Willa Cather
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! View quote
Willa Cather
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. View quote
Willa Cather
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. View quote
Willa Cather
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. View quote
Willa Cather
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)
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. View quote
Willa Cather
In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever. View quote
Willa Cather
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. View quote
Willa Cather
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. View quote
Willa Cather
Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things. View quote
Willa Cather
The supreme virtue in art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives it the right to be. View quote
Willa Cather
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. View quote
Willa Cather
Ugly accidents happen . . . always have and always will. But the failures are swept back into the pile and forgotten. They dont leave any lasting scar in the world, and they dont affect the future. The things that last are the good things. The people who forge ahead and do something, they really count. View quote
Willa Cather
I suppose there were moonless nights and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, but I remember them all as flooded with the rich indolence of a full moon. View quote
Willa Cather
A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude. (Willa Cather)
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. View quote
Willa Cather
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. View quote
Willa Cather
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. View quote
Willa Cather
I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story. View quote
Willa Cather