Willa Cather Quotes

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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
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
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
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
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
Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

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
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
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
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
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
Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.

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
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 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
Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

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
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
Where there is great love there are always miracles.

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
That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.

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
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
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
Where there is great love, there are always wishes.

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

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
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
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

By Willa Cather