Quotes by

Willa Cather

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

Where there is great love there are always miracles. – Willa Cather

The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young. – Willa Cather

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

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

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

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

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

All the intelligence and talent in the world cant make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It cant be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens. – Willa Cather

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

That is happiness to be dissolved into something complete and great. – Willa Cather

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

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

Where there is great love, there are always wishes. – Willa Cather

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

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

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

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

I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived. – Willa Cather

He had the uneasy manner of a man who is not among his own kind, and who has not seen enough of the world to feel that all people are in some sense his own kind. – Willa Cather