Top 380 Willa Cather Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Willa Cather

255. “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

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

— Willa Cather

257. “In their death as in their life the Latins are more socially disposed than we, and the graves in their cemeteries almost always touch each other, they are so closely crowded together.”

— Willa Cather

258. “She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends.”

— Willa Cather

259. “You know that my spells come from God, and that I would not harm any living creature. You believe that every one should worship God in the way revealed to him. But that is not the way of this country. The way here is for all to do alike.”

— Willa Cather

260. “One of Ours by Willa Cather Book One: On Lovely Creek I. 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. “Ralph, Ralph, get awake! Come down and help me wash the car.” “What for?” “Why, aren’t we going to the circus today?”

— Willa Cather

261. “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

262. “How deep they lay, these second persons, and how little one knew about them, except to guard them fiercely. It was to music, more than to anything else, that these hidden things in people responded.”

— Willa Cather

263. “You can’t tell me anything about family life. I’ve had plenty to last me.’ ‘But it’s not all like that,’ I objected. ‘Near enough. It’s all being under somebody’s thumb.”

— Willa Cather

264. “Mrs. Kronborg was a strange woman. That word “talent”, which no one else in Moonstone, not even Dr. Archie, would have understood, she comprehended perfectly. To any other woman there, it would have meant that a child must have her hair curled every day and must play in public. Mrs. Kronborg knew it meant that Thea must practice four hours a day. A child with talent must be kept at the piano, just as a child with measles must be kept under the blankets.”

— Willa Cather

265. “Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.”

— Willa Cather

266. “The great key of success is to work when you are not suited, I fancy.”

— Willa Cather

267. “Clearly, they were proud of each other, and of being so many.”

— Willa Cather

268. “Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.”

— Willa Cather

269. “One is best in one’s own country.”

— Willa Cather

270. “But this afternoon the closed roads opened, the gates dropped. What she had so often tried to reach, lay under her hand. She had only to touch an idea to make it live.”

— Willa Cather

271. “She had seen it when she was at home last summer – the hostility of comfortable, self-satisfied people toward serious effort.”

— Willa Cather

272. “In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance; from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities.”

— Willa Cather

273. “One afternoon late in October of the year 1697, Euclide Auclair, the philosopher apothecary of Quebec, stood on the top of Cap Diamant gazing down the broad, empty river far beneath him.”

— Willa Cather

274. “Like all romancers, she is a little terrified at seeing one of her wildest conceits admitted by the hard-headed world. If our dream comes true, we are almost afraid to believe it; for that is the best of all good fortune, and nothing better can happen to any of us.”

— Willa Cather

275. “She laughed her mellow, easy laugh, that was either very artless or very comprehending, one never quite knew which.”

— Willa Cather

276. “Her interest in these people was more than a business interest. She carried them all in her mind as if they were characters in a book or a play. When.”

— Willa Cather

277. “I liked to watch a play with Lena; everything was wonderful to her, and everything was true. It was like going to revival meetings with someone who was always being converted.”

— Willa Cather

278. “It seems to me that the pleasure one feels in a work of art is just one thing that one does not have to explain.”

— Willa Cather

279. “To be sure, the Bishop was a little theatrical in his humility, as he had been in his grandeur; but that was his way, Auclair reflected, and, after all, nobody can help his way. If a man admits his mistakes, that is a great deal...”

— Willa Cather

280. “I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his outbursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication. How often have I seen him draw his dark brows together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in the carpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his brain.”

— Willa Cather

281. “Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.”

— Willa Cather

282. “He was soon to have done with calendared time, and it had already ceased to count for him. He sat in the middle of his own consciousness; none of his former states of mind were lost or outgrown. They were all within reach of his hand, and all comprehensible.”

— Willa Cather

283. “As in most families, the mere struggle to have anything of one’s own, to be one’s self at all, creates an element of strain that keeps everybody almost at the breaking point.”

— Willa Cather

284. “Prayers said by good people are always good prayers.”

— Willa Cather

285. “Happy people do a great deal for their friends.”

— Willa Cather

286. “The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.”

— Willa Cather

287. “I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.”

— Willa Cather

288. “Once giving way to tears, she wept bitterly for all that she had lost, and all that she must lose so soon. Her mother had had the courage to leave everything she loved and to come out here with her father; she in turn ought to show just that same courage about going back, but she could not find it in her heart.”

— Willa Cather

289. “New things are always ugly.”

— Willa Cather

290. “To note an artist’s limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.”

— Willa Cather

291. “It is easy to pity when once one’s vanity has been tickled.”

— Willa Cather

292. “Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.”

— Willa Cather

293. “His head was the shape of a chocolate drop, and was covered with dry, straw-coloured hair that fuzzed up about his pointed crown.”

— Willa Cather

294. “It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live; and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac’s own estimate, one has lived in vain.”

— Willa Cather

295. “She walked slowly down through the orchard, where the evening air was heavy with the smell of wild cotton. The fresh, salty scent of the wild roses had given way before this more powerful perfume of midsummer. Wherever those ashes-of-rose balls hung on their milky stalks, the air about them was saturated with their breath.”

— Willa Cather

296. “There are times when one’s vitality is too high to be clouded, too elastic to stay down.”

— Willa Cather

297. “He was ready to give up, he felt. He did not know how it had come about, but he was quite willing to go deep under his fields and rest, where the plow could not find him. He was tired of making mistakes. He was content to leave the tangle to other hands;.”

— Willa Cather

298. “When one danced with them, their bodies never moved inside their clothes; their muscles seemed to ask but one thing – not to be disturbed.”

— Willa Cather

299. “But the little buzzing things that lived in the grass were all dead – all but one. While we were lying there against the warm bank, a little insect of the palest, frailest green hopped painfully out of the buffalo grass and tried to leap into a bunch of bluestem. He missed it, fell back, and sat with his head sunk between his long legs, his antennae quivering, as if he were waiting for something to come and finish him.”

— Willa Cather

300. “No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses.”

— Willa Cather