Top 300 Willa Cather Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world’s hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman’s tenderness.”

— Willa Cather

52. “I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!”

— Willa Cather

53. “To note an artist’s limitations is but to define his talent.”

— Willa Cather

54. “When we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord.”

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

56. “Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.”

— Willa Cather

57. “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.”

— Willa Cather

58. “Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.”

— Willa Cather

59. “For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.”

— Willa Cather

60. “The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.”

— Willa Cather

61. “In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.”

— Willa Cather

62. “The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.”

— Willa Cather

63. “The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual; those who were not have been long forgotten.”

— Willa Cather

64. “The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.”

— Willa Cather

65. “The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.”

— Willa Cather

66. “Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.”

— Willa Cather

67. “Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.”

— Willa Cather

68. “The air is of silver and pearl, the night is liquid with moonlight.”

— Willa Cather

69. “The voice is a wild thing. It can’t be bred in captivity.”

— Willa Cather

70. “Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”

— Willa Cather

71. “It opened with the melancholy reflection that, in the lives of mortals the best days are the first to flee. ‘Optima dies... prima fugit.’ I turned back to the beginning of the third book, which we had read in class that morning. ‘Primus ego in patriam mecum... deducam Musas’; ’for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country.”

— Willa Cather

72. “There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

— Willa Cather

73. “Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.”

— Willa Cather

74. “Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.”

— Willa Cather

75. “The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.”

— Willa Cather

76. “I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered – about her teeth, for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.”

— Willa Cather

77. “People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.”

— Willa Cather

78. “The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.”

— Willa Cather

79. “There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

— Willa Cather

80. “Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what’s sensible and what’s foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.”

— Willa Cather

81. “On the edge of the prairie, where the sun had gone down, the sky was turquoise blue, like a lake, with gold light throbbing in it. Higher up, in the utter clarity of the western slope, the evening star hung like a lamp suspended by silver chains – like the lamp engraved up the title-page of old Latin texts, which is always appearing in new heavens and waking new desires in men.”

— Willa Cather

82. “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 there about us always.”

— Willa Cather

83. “If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry.”

— Willa Cather

84. “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

85. “Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.”

— Willa Cather

86. “This is reality, whether you like it or not – all those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.”

— Willa Cather

87. “She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last.”

— Willa Cather

88. “The air and the earth interpenetrated in the warm gusts of spring; the soil was full of sunlight, and the sunlight full of red dust. The air one breathed was saturated with earthy smells, and the grass under foot had a reflection of the blue sky in it.”

— Willa Cather

89. “Ain’t it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other?”

— Willa Cather

90. “Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.”

— Willa Cather

91. “Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.”

— Willa Cather

92. “When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.”

— Willa Cather

93. “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.”

— Willa Cather

94. “William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.”

— Willa Cather

95. “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

96. “Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar.”

— Willa Cather

97. “Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”

— Willa Cather

98. “Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.”

— Willa Cather

99. “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.”

— Willa Cather

100. “Some things are best learned in calm, others in storm.”

— Willa Cather