Willa Cather Quotes

Success is never so interesting as struggle

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

Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions of them.

The end is nothing; the road is all.

Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.

We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it - for a little while.

Where there is great love there are always miracles.

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.

It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.

Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.

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.

People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.

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.

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.

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.

Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.

Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.

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

Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere.

The land belongs to the future.

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.

Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.

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.

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.