Willa Cather Quotes

139 quotes in 1901 categories

• Where there is great love, there are always wishes.
• There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
• The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
• I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
• The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
• 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,…
• Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
• Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
• Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.
• There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
• No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
• 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…
• 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…
• Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
• The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
• Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.
• Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.
• Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
• That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.
• The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.

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