Famous Willa Cather Quotations

First 1 Last 
"The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young."
by Willa Cather
"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."
by Willa Cather
"Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again."
by Willa Cather
"No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person."
by Willa Cather
"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."
by Willa Cather
"I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do."
by 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."
by Willa Sibert 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."
by Willa Cather
"She used to drag her mattress besider her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with excitement, as a machine vibrates from speed. Life rushed in upon her through that window - or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without. There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that is was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation."
by Willa Cather
"That is happiness to be dissolved into something complete and great."
by Willa Sibert Cather
"The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or woman."
by Willa Sibert Cather
"There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm."
by Willa Cather
"Where there is great love, there are always wishes."
by Willa Cather
"Where there is great love, there are always miracles."
by Willa Sibert Cather
"Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen."
by Willa Cather
"Winter lies too long in country towns hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen."
by Willa Cather
"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."
by Willa Sibert Cather
"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."
by 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."
by Willa Cather
"That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great."
by Willa Cather
"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."
by Willa Cather
"Where there is great love there are always miracles."
by 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."
by 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."
by Willa Cather
"Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact."
by Willa Cather
"Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had."
by Willa Cather
"Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form ..."
by Willa Cather
"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 sociologica..."
by Willa Cather
"Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer."
by Willa Cather
"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 th..."
by 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. So in the buffalo times..."
by Willa Cather
"If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy..."
by Willa Cather
"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 wha..."
by Willa Cather
"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 ..."
by Willa Cather
"Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers."
by Willa Cather
"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 t..."
by Willa Cather
"The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern pa..."
by Willa Cather
"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 whic..."
by Willa Cather
"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?..."
by Willa Cather
"Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of th..."
by Willa Cather


Hire a Writer