Quotes by Willa Cather

About Willa Cather:

Willa Sibert Cather was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918). In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

If words had cost money, Tom couldn't have used them more sparingly. The adjectives were purely descriptive, relating to form and colour, and were used to present the objects under consideration, not the young explorer's emotions. Yet through this au...

Willa Cather

Bouchalka was not a reflective person. He had his own idea of what a great prima donna should be like, and he took it for granted that Mme. Garnet corresponded to his conception. The curious thing was that he managed to impress his idea upon Cressida...

Willa Cather

He had never got so much back for himself from any pupil as he did from Miss Kronborg. From the first she had stimulated him; something in her personality invariably affected him. Now that he was feeling his way toward her voice, he found her more in...

Willa Cather

However much they may smile at her, the old inhabitants would miss Tillie. Her stories give them something to talk about and to conjecture about, cut off as they are from the restless currents of the world. The many naked little sandbars which lie be...

Willa Cather

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

Willa Cather

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sym...

Willa Cather

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

Willa Cather

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.

Willa Cather

Where there is great love, there are always wishes.

Willa Cather

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

Willa Cather

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.

Willa Cather

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

Willa Cather

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

Willa Cather

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

Willa Cather

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

Willa Cather

All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.

Willa Cather

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

Willa Cather

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

Willa Cather

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 t...

Willa Cather

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

Willa Cather

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 bottom...

Willa Cather

Author Bio

  • NameWilla Cather
  • DescriptionNovelist, short story writer, poet, essayist
  • BornDecember 7, 1873
  • DiedApril 24, 1947
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Poet; Novelist; Journalist; Essayist
  • AwardsNational Women's Hall Of Fame