Willa Cather
Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.Collection: Ego
It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or if the conventional happy ending was impossible, then it must be a tragedy in which one or both should die. In real life very few of us get what we want, our tragedies don't kill us, but we go on living them year after year, carrying them with us like a scar on an old wound.Collection: Real
One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days.Collection: Happiness
Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.Collection: Men
Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.Collection: Sports
William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.Collection: Personality
In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.Collection: Hate
The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.Collection: Running
It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled.Collection: Vanity
In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way; but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded.Collection: Desire
The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual; those who were not have been long forgotten.Collection: Artist
Setting ... is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.Collection: Stronger
Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?Collection: Beautiful
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there - that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.Collection: Drama
I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.Collection: Snakes
A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.Collection: Lying
Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.Collection: Thinking
I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known her about ever since I could remember anything at all.Collection: Book
From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.Collection: Skeletons
In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart.Collection: Book
Pity is sworn servant unto love: And this be sure, wherever it begin To make the way, it lets your master in.Collection: Way
Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.Collection: Book
One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.Collection: Summer
I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered –about her teeth for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things she had lost, *but whose inner glow has faded*. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.Collection: Thinking
But she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions. It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.Collection: Strong
Personal hatred and family affection are not incompatible; they often flourish and grow strong together.Collection: Family
There was a new kind of strength in the gravity of her face, and her colors still gave her that look of deep-seated health and ardor.Collection: Color
The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer; it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.Collection: Prayer
The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me. In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions... I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen again.Collection: Memories
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 what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.Collection: Father
There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.Collection: Country
Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.Collection: Details
I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!Collection: Two
In New Mexico, he always awoke a young man, not until he arose and began to shave did he realize that he was growing older. His first consciousness was a sense of the light dry wind blowing in through the windows, with the fragrance of hot sun and sage-brush and sweet clover; a wind that made one's body feel light and one's heart cry 'To-day, to-day,' like a child's.Collection: Love
Imagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on — a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation.Collection: Mean
In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.Collection: People
youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself betrayed.Collection: Hurt
For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.Collection: Strong
Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.Collection: Writing
No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses.Collection: Art
Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.Collection: Humanity
He domesticated and developed the native wild flowers. He had one hill-side solidly clad with that low-growing purple verbena which mats over the hills of New Mexico. It was like a great violet velvet mantle thrown down in the sun; all the shades that the dyers and weavers of Italy and France strove for through centuries, the violet that is full of rose colour and is yet not lavender; the blue that becomes almost pink and then retreats again into sea-dark purple—the true Episcopal colour and countless variations of it.Collection: Flower
Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing.Collection: Mean
[Some] people really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist on making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art; expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure, and distraction, and to contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less limited and less intense idealists.Collection: Art
The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech - it is a gift from heart to heart.Collection: Notebook
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.Collection: Art
Money is a protection, a cloak; it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity.Collection: Dignity
When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.Collection: Kindness