Willa Cather Love Quotes & Sayings

Pity is sworn servant unto love: And this be sure, wherever it begin To make the way, it lets your master in. — 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

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

[Some] people really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist on making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art; expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure, and distraction, and to contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less limited and less intense idealists. — 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

I sat helpless to prevent the closing of that chapter of idyllic love, dreading the return of the young man whose ineffable happiness was only to be the measure of his fall. I — Willa Cather

Sometimes," I ventured, "it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty ... I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her ... — Willa Cather

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

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

Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world — Willa Cather

Doctrine is well enough for the wise, Jean; but the miracle is something we can hold in our hands and love. — Willa Cather

Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember. — Willa Cather

In great misfortunes, people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love
if once one has ever fallen in. — Willa Cather

Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody. — Willa Cather

I only knew the schoolbooks said he "died in the wilderness, of a broken heart."
"More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent. — Willa Cather

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

Sometimes falling in love may look like pure madness to those not experiencing it but that's only because they're not involved. Just because other people don't understand your feelings doesn't mean they're not real or they're not important. You have to trust yourself. Feel what you feel and don't worry about anyone else. Love is about you and your significant other, remember that. — Willa Cather

The Professor made no reply to this. Lillian had been fiercely jealous of Tom Outland. As he left the house, he was reflecting that people who are intensely in love when they marry, and who go on being in love, always meet with something which suddenly or gradually makes a difference. Sometimes it is the children, or the grubbiness of being poor, sometimes a second infatuation. In their own case it had been, curiously enough, his pupil, Tom Outland. St. — Willa Cather

Where there is great love, there are always miracles. — Willa Cather

I've seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too ful of life and love. They can't help it. Poeple come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter. — Willa Cather

The land belongs to the future, Carl; that's the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk's plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it
for a little while. — Willa Cather

Ah, he thought, for one who cannot read--or think--the Image, the physical form of Love! — Willa Cather

The rock, when one came to think of it, was the utmost expression of human need; even mere feeling yearned for it; it was the highest comparison of loyalty in love and friendship. Christ Himself had used that comparison for the disciple to whom He gave the keys of His Church. And the Hebrews of the Old Testament, always being carried captive into foreign lands,
their rock was an idea of God, the only thing their conquerors could not take from them. — Willa Cather

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. — Willa Cather

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