Cather Quotes & Sayings

Constant comparisons are the stamp of the foreigner; one continually translates manners and customs of a new country into terms of his own, before he can fully comprehend them. — Willa Cather

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before. — Willa Cather

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. — Willa Cather

Don't love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you. Oh, dear boy, pray that whatever your sacrifice may be, it be not that. — Willa Cather

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

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

He felt as if a clear light broke upon his mind, and with it a conviction that, good was, after all, stronger than evil, and that good was possible to men. He seemed to discover that there was a kind of rapture in which he could love forever without faltering and without sin ... That rapture was for those who could feel it; for people who could not, it was non-existent. — Willa Cather

The man he was now, the personality his friends knew, had begun to grow strong during adolescence, during the years when he was always consciously or unconsciously conjugating the verb "to love"
in society and solitude, with people, with books, with the sky and open country, in the lonesomeness of crowded city streets. — Willa Cather

There was a basic harmony between Antonia and her mistress [Mrs. Harling]. They had strong, independent natures, both of them. They knew what they liked, and were not always trying to imitate other people. They loved children and animals and music, and rough play, and digging in the earth. They liked to prepare rich, hearty food and to see people eat it; to make up soft white beds and to see youngsters asleep in them. They ridiculed conceited people and were quick to help unfortunate ones. Deep down in each of them there was a kind of hearty joviality, a relish of life, not over-delicate, but very invigorating. I never tried to define it, but I was distinctly conscious of it. I could not imagine Antonia's living for a week in any other house in Black Hawk than the Harlings. — Willa Cather

You are the only beautiful thing that has ever come close to me. You came line an angel out of the sky. You are like the music you sing, you are like the stars and the snow on the mountains where I played when I was a little boy. You are like all tha they have killed in me. I die for you tonight, tomorrrow, for all eternity. I am not a cowaqrd; I was afraid cause I lovey ou more than Christ who died for me, more than I am afraid of hell, or hope for heaven. I was never afraid before. — Willa Cather

He came to be very glad that he had known her, and that she had had a hand in breaking him in to life. He has known pretty women and clever ones since then,-- but never one like her, as she was in her best days. Her eyes, when they laughed for a moment into one's own, seemed to promise a wild delight that he has not found in life. "I know where it is," they seemed to say, "I could show you! — Willa Cather

Wherever and whenever that piece is put on, it is April. — Willa Cather

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. — Willa Cather

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. — Willa Cather

Oh, better I like to work out-of-doors than in a house!' she used to sing joyfully. 'I not care that your grandmother say it makes me like a man. I like to be like a man. — Willa Cather

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

A crimson fire that vanquishes the stars;A pungent odor from the dusty sage;A sudden stirring of the huddled herds;A breaking of the distant table-landsThrough purple mists ascending, and the flareOf water ditches silver in the light;A swift, bright lance hurled low across the world;A sudden sickness for the hills of home. — Willa Cather

Your face is flushed, did you know that?"
"Well," she said.
"I'm frustrated."
"Don't make me angry-kiss you."
"Give me the laundry."
"Tempers rising, faces flushed ... This is how it happens."
That made Cath laugh. — Rainbow Rowell

Yesterday's rain had left a bitter, springlike smell in the air; the vehemence that beat against her in the street and hummed above her had something a little wistful in it tonight, like a plaintive hand-organ tune. All the lovely things in the shop windows, the furs and jewels, roses and orchids, seemed to belong to her as she passed them. Not to have wrapped up and sent home, certainly; where would she put them? But they were hers to live among. — Willa Cather

My big rattler was old, and had led too easy a life; there was not much fight in him. He had probably lived there for years, with a fat prairie-dog for breakfast whenever he felt like it, a sheltered home, even an owl-feather bed, perhaps, and he had forgot that the world doesn't owe rattlers a living. A snake of his size, in fighting trim, would be more than any boy could handle. So in reality it was a mock adventure; the game was fixed for me by chance, as it probably was for many a dragon-slayer. — Willa Cather

Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself. — Willa Cather

Yes, there would be a dirty way out of life, if one chose to take it. But she did not want to die. She wanted to live and dream - a hundred years, forever! As long as this sweetness welled up in her heart, as long as her breast could hold this treasure of pain! She felt as the pond must feel when it held the moon like that; when it encircled and swelled with that image of gold. — Willa Cather

One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. — Willa Cather

I want to pretend this didn't happen."
"Okay. — Rainbow Rowell

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

Even after I had pounded his ugly head flat, his body kept on coiling and winding, doubling and falling back on itself. — Willa Cather

Things away from home often look better than they are. — Willa Cather

Prayers said by good people are always good prayers — Willa Cather

The Count himself was ready to die, and he would be glad to die here alone, without pretence and mockery, with no troop of expectant relatives about his bed. The world was not what he had thought it at twenty
or even at forty. — Willa Cather

He was entirely rid of his nervous misgivings, of his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire to show himself different from his surroundings. He felt now that his surroundings explained him. — Willa Cather

And he was such a polite, mannerly old boy; simple and kind as a child. I used to wonder how anybody so innocent and defenceless had managed to get along at all, to keep alive for nearly seventy years in as hard a world as this. Anybody could take advantage of him. He held no grudge against any of the people who had misused him. — Willa Cather

I shall do nothing to discourage my patient, Monseigneur, any more than I shall bleed him, as many good people urge me to do. The mind, too, has a kind of blood; in common speech we call it hope. — Willa Cather

The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech - it is a gift from heart to heart. — Willa Cather

Of course Nebraska is a storehouse of literary material. Everywhere is a storehouse of literary material. If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see. — Willa Cather

Today I stood taller from walking among the trees. — Willa Cather

Many people seem to think that art is a luxury to be imported and tacked on to life. Art springs out of the very stuff that life is made of. Most of our young authors start to write a story and make a few observations from nature to add local color. The results are invariably false and hollow. Art must spring out of the fullness and richness of life. — Willa Cather

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. — Willa Cather

These coppers, big and little, these brooms and clouts and brushes, were tools; and with them one made, not shoes or cabinet-work, but life itself. One made a climate within a climate; one made the days,
the complexion, the special flavour, the special happiness of each day as it passed; one made life. — Willa Cather

And now the old story has begun to write itself over there," said Carl softly. "Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years. — Willa Cather

Inside of living people, too, captives languished. Yes, inside of people who walked and worked in the broad sun, there were captives dwelling in darkness, never seen from birth to death. Into those prisons the moon shone, and the prisoners crept to the windows and looked out with mournful eyes at the white globe which betrayed no secrets and comprehended all. — Willa Cather

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

Some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm. - Willa Cather — Zoraida Cordova

You remember how homesick I used to get, and what long talks we used to have coming from school? We've someway always felt alike about things."
"Yes, that's it; we've liked the same things and we've liked them together, without anybody else knowing. And we've had good times, hunting for Christmas trees and going for ducks and making our plum wine together every year. We've never either of us had any other close friend. And now
— Willa Cather

Too much information is rather deadening. — Willa Cather

She began to wonder whether she would not do better to finish her life alone. What was left of life seemed unimportant. — Willa Cather

It's not a pleasant place to be lying while the world is moving and doing and bettering... but it rather seems as though we ought to go back to the place we came from in the end. — Willa Cather

There were other times when she was so shattered by ideas that she could do nothing worth while; when they trampled over her like an army and she felt as if she were bleeding to death under them. — Willa Cather

He looked up quietly. "You know, don't you, Thee, that I think you are just the finest thing I've struck in this world?"
The tears ran down Thea's cheeks. "You're too good to me, Ray. You're a lot too good to me," she faltered. — Willa Cather

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

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

The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like a bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. — 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

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

Many a night that summer she left Dr. Archie's office with a desire to run and run about those quiet streets until she wore out her shoes, or wore out the streets themselves; when her chest ached and it seemed as if her heart were spreading all over the desert. When she went home, it was not to go to sleep. She used to drag her mattress beside her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with excitement, as a machine vibrates from speed. Life rushed in upon her through that window
or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without. There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that it was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation. It was on such nights that Thea Kronborg learned the thing that old Dumas meant when he told the Romanticists that to make a drama he needed but one passion and four walls. — Willa Cather

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. — Willa Cather

Presently we saw a curious thing: There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share - black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun. Even — Willa Cather

A group of girls with their hair hanging loose over their shoulders, and the most strident voices imaginable, sold flowers at the foot of an equestrian statue, done in bronze by Thornycroft when the Empress was a young woman. — Willa Cather

Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man of taste who does not very often get to Boston. — Willa Cather

I think irony precludes really feeling deeply about anything. I just didn't want to be that kind of writer who found nothing that wasn't worth indictment. I admire Willa Cather so much because she was unafraid to have big feelings and put them on the page. I just want to be able to believe in things. — Tony Earley

Thy judgment seat, which is also Thy mercy seat.' All — Willa Cather

He's made himself a rabbit-skin cap, Jim, and a rabbit-skin collar that he buttons on outside his coat. They ain't got but one overcoat among 'em over there, and they take turns wearing it. They seem awful scared of cold, and stick in that hole in the bank like badgers. — Willa Cather

She wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson ... " "No, living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway - a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe - all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Tender Is the Night. I really like Willa Cather. Have you read My Mortal Enemy?" With no particular expression, she said, "Actually, I wrote it. — Truman Capote

The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern. — Willa Cather

You flirt with everything." She could tell that her eyes were popping
her eyeballs actually felt cold around the edges. "You flirt with old people and babies and everybody in between. — Rainbow Rowell

Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said ... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret? — Willa Cather

But now that the vivid consciousness of an earlier state had come back to him, the Professor felt that life with this Kansas boy, little as there had been of it, was the realest of his lives, and that all the years between had been accidental and ordered from the outside. His career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a chain of events which had happened to him. All these things had nothing to do with the person he was in the beginning. The — Willa Cather

This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark. The growing piles of ashes and cinders in the back yards were the only evidence that the wasteful, consuming process of life went on at all. — Willa Cather

New things are always ugly. — Willa Cather

The grudge was fundamental. Perhaps he could not have given it up if he tried. Perhaps he got more satisfaction out of feeling himself abused that he would have got out of being loved. — Willa Cather

Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet. — Willa Cather

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

The Sun shone into my bath water through the West half window, and a big Maltese cat came and rub himself against the tub, watching me curiously. While I scrubbed my grandmother busy herself in the dining room. — Willa Cather

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

He could remember a time when the loneliness of death had terrified him, when the idea of it was insupportable. He used to feel that if his wife could but lie in the same coffin with him, his body would not be so insensible that the nearness of hers would not give it comfort. But now he thought of eternal solitude with gratefulness; as a release from every obligation, from every form of effort. It was the Truth. One — Willa Cather

Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James. — Willa Cather

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

What would we do together?" Cath asked. "He'd want to go to the bar,and I'd want to stay home and write fanfiction. — Rainbow Rowell

The truth is, it is enough to live in this country. Just to live. Work isn't necessary for the salvation of the soul. — Willa Cather

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. — Willa Cather

Montaigne says somewhere that in early youth the joy of life lies in the feet. — Willa Cather

You can't tell me anything about family life. I've had plenty to last me.' 'But it's not all like that,' I objected. 'Near enough. It's all being under somebody's thumb. — Willa Cather

She had no little vanities, only one big one, and she would never forgive. — Willa Cather

He domesticated and developed the native wild flowers. He had one hill-side solidly clad with that low-growing purple verbena which mats over the hills of New Mexico. It was like a great violet velvet mantle thrown down in the sun; all the shades that the dyers and weavers of Italy and France strove for through centuries, the violet that is full of rose colour and is yet not lavender; the blue that becomes almost pink and then retreats again into sea-dark purple - the true Episcopal colour and countless variations of it. — Willa Cather

I know that I am going away on my own account. I must make the usual effort. I must have something to show for myself. To take what you would give me, I should have to be either a very large man or a very small one, and I am only in the middle class. — Willa Cather

Success is never so interesting as struggle — Willa Cather

If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don't care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations. — Willa Cather

It seems to me that the pleasure one feels in a work of art is just one thing that one does not have to explain. — Willa Cather

How deep they lay, these second persons, and how little one knew about them, except to guard them fiercely. It was to music, more than to anything else, that these hidden things in people responded. — Willa Cather

A burnt dog dreads the fire. — Willa Cather

The children you don't especially need, you have always with you, like the poor. But the bright ones get away from you. They have their own way to make in the world. Seems like the brighter they are, the farther they go. — Willa Cather

If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate!
A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be. — Willa Cather

He is convinced that the people who might mean something to him will always misjudge him and pass him by. He is not so much afraid of loneliness as he is of accepting cheap substitutes; of making excuses to himself for a teacher who flatters him, of waking up some morning to find himself admiring a girl merely because she is accessible. He has a dread of easy compromises, and he is terribly afraid of being fooled. — Willa Cather

You feel that, properly, Alexandra's house is the big-out-of-doors, and that it is in the soil that she expresses herself.
-O Pioneers — Willa Cather

Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange. — Willa Cather

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. — Willa Cather

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. — Willa Cather

That wasn't just a kiss, Cather. There was no just. (Levi) — Rainbow Rowell

Yes, Sangre de Cristo; but no matter how scarlet the sunset, those red hills never became vermillion, but a more and more intense rose-carnelian; not the colour of living blood, the Bishop had often reflected, but the colour of the dried blood of saints and martyres preserved in old churches in Rome, which liquefies upon occasion. — Willa Cather

That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero's death - heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day. How — Willa Cather

Merely having seen the season change in a country gave one the sense of having been there for a long time. — Willa Cather