Top 300 Willa Cather Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole – so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.”

— Willa Cather

202. “Since then she had changed so much in her thoughts, in her ways, even in her looks, that she might wonder she knew herself – except that the changes were all in the direction of becoming more and more herself.”

— Willa Cather

203. “As I remember them, what unprotected faces they were; their very roughness and violence made them defenceless. These boys had no practised manner behind which they could retreat and hold people at a distance. They only had their hard fists to batter at the world with.”

— Willa Cather

204. “Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.”

— Willa Cather

205. “If youth did not matter so much to itself, it would never have the heart to go on.”

— Willa Cather

206. “Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.”

— Willa Cather

207. “I shall die of having lived.”

— Willa Cather

208. “To fulfil the dreams of one’s youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.”

— Willa Cather

209. “For the first time I felt the pull of race and blood and kindred, and felt beating within me things that had not begun with me. It was as if the earth under my feet had grasped and rooted me, and were pouring its essence into me. I sat there until the dawn of morning, and all night long my life seemed to be pouring out of me and running into the ground.”

— Willa Cather

210. “I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.”

— Willa Cather

211. “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

212. “He had been a fool to imagine it, but he was glad he had been a fool. She had given him one grand dream.”

— Willa Cather

213. “We must rest, he told himself, on our confidence in His design. Design was clear enough in the stars, the seasons, in the woods and fields. But in human affairs – ? Perhaps our bewilderment came from a fault in our perceptions; we could never see what was behind the next turn of the road.”

— Willa Cather

214. “I believed devoutly in her power to fascinate him, in her dazzling loveliness. I believed her young, ardent, reckless, disillusioned, under sentence, feverish, avid of pleasure.”

— Willa Cather

215. “I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.”

— Willa Cather

216. “All the intelligence and talent in the world can’t make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can’t be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.”

— Willa Cather

217. “Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness – why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?”

— Willa Cather

218. “But she’s the kind that won’t be downed easily. She’ll work all day and go to a Bohemian wedding and dance all night, and drive the hay wagon for a cross man next morning.”

— Willa Cather

219. “The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern.”

— Willa Cather

220. “A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.”

— Willa Cather

221. “Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding.”

— Willa Cather

222. “The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.”

— Willa Cather

223. “He is convinced that the people who might mean something to him will always misjudge him and pass him by. He is not so much afraid of loneliness as he is of accepting cheap substitutes; of making excuses to himself for a teacher who flatters him, of waking up some morning to find himself admiring a girl merely because she is accessible. He has a dread of easy compromises, and he is terribly afraid of being fooled.”

— Willa Cather

224. “Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.”

— Willa Cather

225. “Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.”

— Willa Cather

226. “His spirit was warped by bitter vindictiveness and puerile self-commiseration, and he spent his days in scorn of the labour that brought him bread and in pitiful devotion to the labour that brought him only disappointment, writing interminable scores which demanded of the orchestra everything under heaven except melody.”

— Willa Cather

227. “Tears flashed into her eyes. “That’s very dear of you. It’s sweet to be remembered when one is away.” In her voice there was the heart-breaking sweetness one sometimes hears in lovely, gentle old songs.”

— Willa Cather

228. “In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”

— Willa Cather

229. “I ain’t got time to learn. I can work like mans now.”

— Willa Cather

230. “The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world.”

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

232. “The flakes came down so thickly that from the sitting-room windows I could not see beyond the windmill – its frame looked dim and grey, unsubstantial like a shadow. The snow did not stop falling all day, or during the night that followed. The cold was not severe, but the storm was quiet and resistless.”

— Willa Cather

233. “We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on cigar-box lids.”

— Willa Cather

234. “A child’s attitude toward everything is an artist’s attitude.”

— Willa Cather

235. “As far as we could see, the miles of copper red grass were drenched in sunlight that was stronger and fiercer than at any other time of day.”

— Willa Cather

236. “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

237. “In those days, even in European countries, death had a solemn social importance. It was not regarded as a moment when certain bodily organs ceased to function, but as a dramatic climax, a moment when the soul made its entrance into the next world, passing in full consciousness through a lowly door to an unimaginable scene. Among the watchers there was always the hope that.”

— Willa Cather

238. “Thea was still under the belief that public opinion could be placated; that if you clucked often enough, the hens would mistake you for one of themselves.”

— Willa Cather

239. “Merely having seen the season change in a country gave one the sense of having been there for a long time.”

— Willa Cather

240. “Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.”

— Willa Cather

241. “During those last weeks of the Bishop’s life he thought very little about death; it was the Past he was leaving. The future would take care of itself.”

— Willa Cather

242. “Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand – a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods – or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.”

— Willa Cather

243. “She was like someone in whom the faculty of becoming interested is worn out.”

— Willa Cather

244. “Language was like clothes; it could be a help to one, or it could give one away. But the most important thing was that one should not pretend to be what one was not.”

— Willa Cather

245. “The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.”

— Willa Cather

246. “In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way; but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded.”

— Willa Cather

247. “What Hicks had wanted most in this world was to run a garage and repair shop with his old chum, Dell Able. Beaufort ended all that. He means to conduct a sort of memorial shop, anyhow, with “Hicks and Able” over the door. He wants to roll up his sleeves and look at the logical and beautiful inwards of automobiles for the rest of his life.”

— Willa Cather

248. “Because he talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull from constant use.”

— Willa Cather

249. “You must pray for him, my child. It is to such as he that our Blessed Mother comes nearest.”

— Willa Cather

250. “Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone.”

— Willa Cather