Willa Cather quotes - page 6

I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow. (Willa Cather)
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. View quote
Willa Cather
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. View quote
Willa Cather
The prayers of all good people are good. View quote
Willa Cather
Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they're in love with somebody. View quote
Willa Cather
Isn't it queer there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before like the larks in this country that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years. View quote
Willa Cather
Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world, but here the earth is the floor of the sky. View quote
Willa Cather
If youth did not matter so much to itself it would never have the heart to go on. View quote
Willa Cather
We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on a cigar-box lid. View quote
Willa Cather
The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness. View quote
Willa Cather
I keep my mind on it. That's the whole trick, in so far as stage experience goes; keeping right there every second. If I think of anything else for a flash, I'm gone, done for. But at the same time, one can take things in - with another part of your brain, maybe. It's different from what you get in study, more practical and conclusive. There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm. You learn the delivery of a part only before an audience. (Willa Cather)
Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour's household, and, underneath, another - secret and passionate and intense - which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him. View quote
Willa Cather