Top 300 Willa Cather Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people.”

— Willa Cather

152. “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

153. “There is no God but one God and Art is his revealer; that’s my creed and I’ll follow it to the end, to a hotter place than Pittsburgh if need be.”

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

155. “Everything seemed to have succumbed, to have sunk to sleep, under the great, golden, tender, midsummer moon. The splendor of it seemed to transcend human life and human fate. The senses were too feeble to take it in, and every time one looked up at the sky one felt unequal to it, as if one were sitting deaf under the waves of a great river of melody.”

— Willa Cather

156. “But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy’s mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.”

— Willa Cather

157. “Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones.”

— Willa Cather

158. “Wherever and whenever that piece is put on, it is April.”

— Willa Cather

159. “From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted; and nobody knew why.”

— Willa Cather

160. “Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.”

— Willa Cather

161. “Her rapid footsteps shook her own floors, and she routed lassitude and indifference wherever she came.”

— Willa Cather

162. “How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!”

— Willa Cather

163. “Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer’s own, individual, unique.”

— Willa Cather

164. “Most beautiful of all was the tarnished gold of the elms, with a little brown in it, a little bronze, a little blue, even – a blue like amethyst, which made them melt into the azure haze with a kind of happiness, a harmony of mood that filled the air with content.”

— Willa Cather

165. “The record of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches on stone left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may, after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of human strivings.”

— Willa Cather

166. “It’s all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies; our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?”

— Willa Cather

167. “I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known her about ever since I could remember anything at all.”

— Willa Cather

168. “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

169. “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

170. “Where there is great love there are always miracles,′ he said at length. ‘One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. 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

171. “I tell you there is such a thing as creative hate.”

— Willa Cather

172. “Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.”

— Willa Cather

173. “Imagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on – a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation.”

— Willa Cather

174. “Her voice had a peculiarly engaging quality; it was deep, a little husky, and one always heard the breath vibrating behind it. Everything she said seemed to come right out of her heart. One.”

— Willa Cather

175. “It is a tragic hour, that hour when we are finally driven to reckon with ourselves, when every avenue of mental distraction has been cut off and our own life and all its ineffaceable failures closes about us like the walls of that old torture chamber of the Inquisition.”

— Willa Cather

176. “Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife – beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.”

— Willa Cather

177. “The carnations in his coat were drooping with the cold, he noticed, their red glory all over.”

— Willa Cather

178. “But whenever my consciousness was quickened, all those early friends were quickened within it, and in some strange way they accompanied me through all my new experiences. They were so much alive in me that I scarcely stopped to wonder whether they were alive anywhere else. Or how.”

— Willa Cather

179. “It came over him now that the unexpected favours of fortune, no matter how dazzling, do not mean very much to us. They may excite or divert us for a time, but 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

180. “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.”

— Willa Cather

181. “I could pick out exactly the right sort of woman for Frank – now. The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it’s exactly the sort you are not. Then what are you going to do about it?” she asked candidly.”

— Willa Cather

182. “Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.”

— Willa Cather

183. “The years seemed to stretch before her like the land; spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning, the same pulling at the chain – until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released.”

— Willa Cather

184. “Antonia came in and stood before me... It was a shock, of course. It always is, to meet people after long years, especially if they have lived as much and as hard as this woman had. We stood looking at each other. The eyes that peered anxiously at me were – simply Antonia’s eyes... As I confronted her, the changes grew less apparent to me, her identity stronger. She was there in the full vigour of her personality, battered, but not diminished...”

— Willa Cather

185. “People always think the bread of another country is better than their own.”

— Willa Cather

186. “When the Cathedral bell tolled just after dark, the Mexican population of Santa Fe fell upon their knees, and all American Catholics as well. Many others who did not kneel prayed in their hearts. Eusabio and the Tesuque boys went quietly away to tell their people; and the next morning the old Archbishop lay before the high altar in the church he had built.”

— Willa Cather

187. “An artist’s saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.”

— Willa Cather

188. “In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.”

— Willa Cather

189. “Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.”

— Willa Cather

190. “A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it’s better than a new one.”

— Willa Cather

191. “Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there – that, we may say, is created.”

— Willa Cather

192. “Either a building is part of a place or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.”

— Willa Cather

193. “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

194. “Everything showed him to be a man of gentle birth – brave, sensitive, courteous. His manners, even when he was alone in the desert, were distinguished. He had a kind of courtesy toward himself, toward his beasts, toward the juniper tree before which he knelt, and the God whom he was addressing.”

— Willa Cather

195. “The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer; it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.”

— Willa Cather

196. “Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.”

— Willa Cather

197. “I could feel his heart pump and his muscles strain,” she said, “when he balanced himself and me on the rocks. I knew that if we fell, we’d go together; he would never drop me”.”

— Willa Cather

198. “She was quick to anger, quick to laughter, and jolly from the depths of her soul.”

— Willa Cather

199. “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

200. “The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it’s exactly the sort you are not.”

— Willa Cather