Top 300 Willa Cather Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Some things are best learned in calm, others in storm.”

— Willa Cather

102. “Oh, that’s the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.”

— Willa Cather

103. “The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.”

— Willa Cather

104. “It was just this solitariness of love in which a priest’s life could be like his Master’s. It was not a solitude of atrophy, of negation, but of perpetual flowering.”

— Willa Cather

105. “The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.”

— Willa Cather

106. “I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man’s experience is.”

— Willa Cather

107. “Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.”

— Willa Cather

108. “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

109. “The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.”

— Willa Cather

110. “It was a crisp autumn evening, just cold enough to make one glad to quit playing tag in the yard, and retreat into the kitchen.”

— Willa Cather

111. “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

112. “The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant on one’s back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky.”

— Willa Cather

113. “Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world.”

— Willa Cather

114. “The wind shook the doors and windows impatiently, then swept on again, singing through the big spaces. Each gust, as it bore down, rattled the panes, and swelled off like the others. They made me think of defeated armies, retreating; or of ghosts who were trying desperately to get in for shelter, and then went moaning on.”

— Willa Cather

115. “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

116. “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

117. “Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together.”

— Willa Cather

118. “The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.”

— Willa Cather

119. “If you don’t keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago.”

— Willa Cather

120. “In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart.”

— Willa Cather

121. “There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back. Like the plains of Lombardy, it seems to rise a little to meet the sun. The air and the earth are curiously mated and intermingled, as if the one were the breath of the other. You feel in the atmosphere the same tonic, puissant quality that is in the tilth, the same strength and resoluteness.”

— Willa Cather

122. “A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.”

— Willa Cather

123. “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

124. “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

125. “There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back.”

— Willa Cather

126. “As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.”

— Willa Cather

127. “I never came upon the place without emotion, and in all that country it was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence – the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.”

— Willa Cather

128. “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

129. “The prayers of all good people are good,” he said quietly.”

— Willa Cather

130. “It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.”

— Willa Cather

131. “It is cremated youth. It is all yours – no one gave it to you.”

— Willa Cather

132. “This land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces.”

— Willa Cather

133. “Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is.”

— Willa Cather

134. “Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.”

— Willa Cather

135. “I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”

— Willa Cather

136. “I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you.”

— Willa Cather

137. “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

138. “One may have staunch friends in one’s own family, but one seldom has admirers.”

— Willa Cather

139. “Some people’s lives are affected by what happens to their person or their property; but for others fate is what happens to their feelings and their thoughts – that and nothing more.”

— Willa Cather

140. “It was only one splendid breath they had, in spite of their brave mockery at the winter outside the glass; and it was a losing game in the end, it seemed, this revolt against the homilies by which the world is run.”

— Willa Cather

141. “There was a new kind of strength in the gravity of her face, and her colors still gave her that look of deep-seated health and ardor.”

— Willa Cather

142. “I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people.”

— Willa Cather

143. “The country girls were considered a menace to the social order. Their beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background.”

— Willa Cather

144. “Niel felt tonight that the right man could still save her, even now. She was still her own indomitable self, going through her old part, – but only the stage hands were left to listen to her. All those who had shared in fine undertakings and bright occasions were gone.”

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

146. “From the time the Englishman’s bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.”

— Willa Cather

147. “As I sat down to my book at last, my old dream about Lena coming across the harvest-field in her short skirt seemed to me like the memory of an actual experience. It floated before me on the page like a picture, and underneath it stood the mournful line: ‘Optima dies... prima fugit.”

— Willa Cather

148. “Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.”

— Willa Cather

149. “I belong on a farm. I’m never lonesome here like I used to be in town. You remember what sad spells I used to have, when I didn’t know what was the matter with me? I’ve never had them out here. And I don’t mind work a bit, if I don’t have to put up with sadness.”

— Willa Cather

150. “One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.”

— Willa Cather