Willa Cather Quotes - Page 9

There was a new kind of strength in the gravity of her face, and her colors still gave her that look of deep-seated health and ardor.

Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.

I have not much faith in women in fiction.... Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.

Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.

So long as a novelist works selfishly for the pleasure of creating character and situation corresponding to his own illusions, ideals and intuitions, he will always produce something worth while and natural. Directly he takes himself too seriously and begins for the alleged benefit of humanity an elaborate dissection of complexes, he evolves a book that is more ridiculous and tiresome than the most conventional cold cream girl novel of yesterday.

Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones.

Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.

Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.

From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted; and nobody knew why.

Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.

Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.

I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication.

If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry

Happy people do a great deal for their friends.

The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.

The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.

I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now.

Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine.

The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.

The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.

This land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces.

There is a popular superstition that "realism" asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. But is not realism, more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer toward his material, a vague indication of the sympathy and candour with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme?

One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.

Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is.

Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.