Top 300 Willa Cather Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Then you do not believe in progress?” “Change is not always progress, Monseigneur.”

— Willa Cather

252. “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

253. “Her sarcasm was so quick, so fine at the point – it was like being touched by metal so cold that one doesn’t know whether one is burned or chilled.”

— Willa Cather

254. “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

255. “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

256. “She asked me whether I had learned to like big cities. ‘I’d always be miserable in a city. I’d die of lonesomeness. I like to be where I know every stack and tree, and where all the ground is friendly. I want to live and die here.”

— Willa Cather

257. “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

258. “The mind, too, has a kind of blood; in common speech we call it hope.”

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

260. “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

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

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Willa Cather

266. “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

267. “The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.”

— Willa Cather

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

273. “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

274. “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

275. “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

276. “Money and office and success are the consolations of impotence. Fortune turns kind to such solid people and lets them suck their bone in peace. She flecks her whip upon flesh that is more alive, upon that stream of hungry boys and girls who tramp the streets of every city, recognizable by their pride and discontent, who are the Future, and who possess the treasure of creative power.”

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

278. “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

279. “New things are always ugly.”

— Willa Cather

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Willa Cather

284. “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

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

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

287. “He often quoted to his students that passage from their fellow Auvergnat, Pascal: that Man was lost and saved in a garden.”

— Willa Cather

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

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

— Willa Cather

292. “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

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

— Willa Cather

294. “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

295. “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

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

— Willa Cather

297. “Don’t you feel that at this rate there isn’t much in it? In what? In living at all, going on as we do. What do we get out of it? Take a day like this: you waken up in the morning and you’re glad to be alive; it’s a good enough day for anything, and you feel sure something will happen. Well, whether it’s a workday or a holiday, it’s all the same in the end. At night you go to bed – nothing has happened.”

— Willa Cather

298. “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

299. “It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the foundation of early races.”

— Willa Cather

300. “The Count himself was ready to die, and he would be glad to die here alone, without pretence and mockery, with no troop of expectant relatives about his bed. The world was not what he had thought it at twenty – or even at forty.”

— Willa Cather