Words matter. These are the best Willa Cather Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
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.
The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.
Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
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.
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.
No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.
I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.
That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.
Where there is great love, there are always wishes.
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
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. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.
A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it’s better than a new one.
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.
Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.
