Willa Cather
Where there is great love, there are always wishes.Collection: Valentines
I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.Collection: Death
The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.Collection: Truth
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.Collection: Sympathy
There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.Collection: Best
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.Collection: Intelligence
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.Collection: Nature
The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.Collection: Relationship
That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.Collection: Happiness
Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.Collection: Friendship
Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.
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.
Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.
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.
When we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord.
Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.
A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.
The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
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.
No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions of them.Collection: Miracle
Success is never so interesting as struggleCollection: Success
The end is nothing; the road is all.Collection: Life
Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.Collection: Sky
Where there is great love there are always miracles.Collection: Love
It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.Collection: Natural
People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.Collection: Pain
Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere.Collection: Mean
The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.Collection: Long
Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together.Collection: Shadow
The test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Success
Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.Collection: Creativity
life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.Collection: Life
When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.Collection: Eye