Willa Cather Quotes - Page 3

Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.

I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.

Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together.

There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.

Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.

The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity.

The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.

life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.

Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.

Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.

What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?

Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.

Every artist knows that there is no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion.

One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days.

The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer; it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.

The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.

You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?

The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me. In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions... I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen again.

The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself.

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.

Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.

It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or if the conventional happy ending was impossible, then it must be a tragedy in which one or both should die. In real life very few of us get what we want, our tragedies don't kill us, but we go on living them year after year, carrying them with us like a scar on an old wound.