Willa Cather Quotes - Page 2

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.

People always think the bread of another country is better than their own.

When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all.Willa Cather

The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.

All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.

On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.

When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.

The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.

The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.

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

The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.

Some things are best learned in calm, others in storm.

To fulfil the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.

It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies; our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?

Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar.

When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

The test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.

The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life.

Some people's lives are affected by what happens to their person or their property; but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts -- that and nothing more.

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

[Dawn] is always such a forgiving time. When that first cold, bright streak comes over the water, it's as if all our sins were pardoned; as if the sky leaned over the earth and kissed it and gave it absolution.

Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.