Top 300 Willa Cather Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Where there is great love, there are always miracles.”

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

3. “The end is nothing; the road is all.”

— Willa Cather

4. “Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.”

— Willa Cather

5. “The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing – desire.”

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

8. “Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.”

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

10. “Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.”

— Willa Cather

11. “A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.”

— Willa Cather

12. “I don’t want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.”

— Willa Cather

Featured in: Reading Quotes

13. “Success is never so interesting as struggle.”

— Willa Cather

14. “Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.”

— Willa Cather

15. “Too much information is rather deadening.”

— Willa Cather

16. “What if – what if Life itself were the sweetheart?”

— Willa Cather

17. “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 bottomless.”

— Willa Cather

18. “The land belongs to the future.”

— Willa Cather

19. “People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again – but it finds a tougher surface.”

— Willa Cather

20. “Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions of them.”

— Willa Cather

21. “People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.”

— Willa Cather

22. “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

23. “The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify – it was like the light of truth itself.”

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

26. “There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.”

— Willa Cather

27. “A burnt dog dreads the fire.”

— Willa Cather

28. “A soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.”

— Willa Cather

29. “One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world’s end somewhere, and hold fast to the days...”

— Willa Cather

30. “Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!”

— Willa Cather

31. “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

32. “On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men’s affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.”

— Willa Cather

33. “Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.”

— Willa Cather

34. “As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.”

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

36. “Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere.”

— Willa Cather

37. “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.”

— Willa Cather

38. “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

39. “The test of one’s decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.”

— Willa Cather

40. “Money is a protection, a cloak; it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity.”

— Willa Cather

41. “Personal hatred and family affection are not incompatible; they often flourish and grow strong together.”

— Willa Cather

Featured in: Strong Quotes

42. “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

43. “A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.”

— Willa Cather

44. “Art and religion -they are the same thing, in the end, of course- have given man the only happiness he has ever had.”

— Willa Cather

45. “Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.”

— Willa Cather

46. “Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.”

— Willa Cather

47. “The supreme virtue in art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives it the right to be.”

— Willa Cather

48. “You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?”

— Willa Cather

49. “Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing.”

— Willa Cather

50. “Art, it seems to me, should simplify.”

— Willa Cather