Willa Cather Quotes - Page 5

No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.

Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.

Too much information is rather deadening.

There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.

When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.

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 stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world.

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 from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.

What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.

The great pines stand at a considerable distance from each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks alone. They do notintrude upon each other. The Navajos are not much in the habit of giving or of asking help. Their language is not a communicative one, and they never attempt an interchange of personality in speech. Over their forests there is the same inexorable reserve. Each tree has its exalted power to bear.

Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.

Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.

After all, the supreme virtue in all art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives art a right to be.

Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.

Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.

The summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact of the world.

There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back.

Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.

How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!

Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.

Look at my papa here; he's been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him.

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.

Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?