Willa Cather quotes

Willa Cather was an American novelist renowned for her vivid portrayals of frontier life and pioneer spirit. Her works, such as "My Ántonia" and "O Pioneers!", captured the landscapes and struggles of settlers in the American Midwest. She became one of the most celebrated writers of early twentieth-century American literature. Here are 137 of her quotes:

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

Willa Cather

It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.

Willa Cather

The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.

Willa Cather

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

Willa Cather

Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.

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.

Willa Cather

Where there is great love, there are always wishes.

Willa Cather

A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.

Willa Cather

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.

Willa Cather

The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.

Willa Cather

No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.

Willa Cather

The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.

Willa Cather

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.

Willa Cather

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.

Willa Cather

Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.

Willa Cather

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.

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.

Willa Cather

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

Willa Cather

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.

Willa Cather

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.

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 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.

Willa Cather

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.

Willa Cather