Willa Cather
The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.Collection: People
To fulfil the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.Collection: Dream
It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies; our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?Collection: Inspiring
Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.Collection: Rose
Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.Collection: Land
What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?Collection: What If
[Dawn] is always such a forgiving time. When that first cold, bright streak comes over the water, it's as if all our sins were pardoned; as if the sky leaned over the earth and kissed it and gave it absolution.Collection: Sky
The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it's exactly the sort you are not.Collection: Men
There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.Collection: Children
Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.Collection: Imaginative
Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.Collection: Thinking
On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.Collection: Men
Many people seem to think that art is a luxury to be imported and tacked on to life. Art springs out of the very stuff that life is made of. Most of our young authors start to write a story and make a few observations from nature to add local color. The results are invariably false and hollow. Art must spring out of the fullness and richness of life.Collection: Art
I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light and air abot me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would only be sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.Collection: Light
The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity.Collection: Voice
You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?Collection: People
The land belongs to the future.Collection: Land
The air and the earth interpenetrated in the warm gusts of spring; the soil was full of sunlight, and the sunlight full of red dust. The air one breathed was saturated with earthy smells, and the grass under foot had a reflection of the blue sky in it.Collection: Art
All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.Collection: Paris
When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all.Willa CatherCollection: People
People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.Collection: People
The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.Collection: Wisdom
An artist's saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.Collection: Artist
"More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.Collection: Girl
Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone.Collection: Book
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 which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.Collection: Quality
There is a popular superstition that "realism" asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. But is not realism, more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer toward his material, a vague indication of the sympathy and candour with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme?Collection: Attitude
From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted; and nobody knew why.Collection: Light
Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.Collection: Inspirational Love
If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don't care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.Collection: Breathing
If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetryCollection: Girl
I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now.Collection: I Can
I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication.Collection: Communication
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.Collection: Powerful
Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.Collection: Book
Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar.Collection: Men
Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.Collection: Powerful
People always think the bread of another country is better than their own.Collection: Country
Some things are best learned in calm, others in storm.Collection: Storm
If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be.Collection: Prayer
People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.Collection: People
Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.Collection: Art
The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself.Collection: Sunset
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 the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion.Collection: Art
The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life.Collection: Men
A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.Collection: Essentials
I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.Collection: Book
Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.Collection: Fate
The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.Collection: Lying