Top 300 Willa Cather Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “And what I like best in you is this particular enthusiasm, which is not at all practical or sensible, which is downright Quixotic. You are not altogether what you seem, and you have your reservations. Living among the wolves, you have not become one.”

— Willa Cather

304. “Sometimes you will need to be understood; what you never show to anyone will need companionship. And then you must come to me.”

— Willa Cather

305. “Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.”

— Willa Cather

306. “Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.”

— Willa Cather

307. “We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.”

— Willa Cather

308. “Even after I had pounded his ugly head flat, his body kept on coiling and winding, doubling and falling back on itself.”

— Willa Cather

309. “The past closes up behind one, somehow. One would rather have a new kind of misery. The old kind seems like death or unconsciousness. You can’t force your life back into that mould again. No, one can’t go back.”

— Willa Cather

310. “Are you going to let me love you a little, Bartley?”

— Willa Cather

311. “With prosperity came a kind of callousness; everybody wanted to destroy the old things they used to take pride in. The orchards, which had been nursed and tended so carefully twenty years ago, were now left to die of neglect. It was less trouble to run into town in an automobile and buy fruit than it was to raise it.”

— Willa Cather

312. “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

313. “The children you don’t especially need, you have always with you, like the poor. But the bright ones get away from you. They have their own way to make in the world. Seems like the brighter they are, the farther they go.”

— Willa Cather

314. “Oh, great and just God, no man among us knows what the sleeper knows, nor is it for us to judge what lies between him and Thee.”

— Willa Cather

315. “These coppers, big and little, these brooms and clouts and brushes, were tools; and with them one made, not shoes or cabinet-work, but life itself. One made a climate within a climate; one made the days, – the complexion, the special flavour, the special happiness of each day as it passed; one made life.”

— Willa Cather

316. “He reminded himself of that cry, wrung from his Saviour on the Cross, “J’ai soif!” Of all our Lord’s physical sufferings, only one, “I thirst,” rose to His lips.”

— Willa Cather

317. “Wherever there was a French priest, there should be a garden of fruit trees and vegetables and flowers. He often quoted to his students that passage from their fellow Auvergnat, Pascal: that Man was lost and saved in a garden.”

— Willa Cather

318. “We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it – for a little while.”

— Willa Cather

319. “That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”

— Willa Cather

320. “Because he talked so little, his words had a peculiar force; they were not worn dull from constant use. His prayers reflected what he was thinking about at the time, and it was chiefly through them that we got to know his feelings and his views about things.”

— Willa Cather

321. “According to her conception of education, one should learn, not think; and above all, one must not enquire. The history of the human race, as it lay behind one, was already explained; and so was its destiny, which lay before. The mind should remain obediently within the theological concept of history.”

— Willa Cather

322. “Things would have been very different with poor Antonia if her father had lived.”

— Willa Cather

323. “That’s a badger hole. He’s about as big as a big ’possum, and his face is striped, black and white. He takes a chicken once in a while, but I won’t let the men harm him. In a new country a body feels friendly to the animals. I like to have him come out and watch me when I’m at work.”

— Willa Cather

324. “Misfortune seemed to settle like an evil bird on the roof of the log house, and to flap its wings there, warning human beings away.”

— Willa Cather

325. “Do you feel at peace with the world here? I think we shall be very happy. I haven’t any fears. I think when friends marry, they are safe. We don’t suffer like – those young ones.”

— Willa Cather

326. “I have almost become a Mexican! I have learned to like chili colorado and mutton fat. Their foolish ways no longer offend me, their very faults are dear to me. I am their man!”

— Willa Cather

327. “The forest rose about this open glade like an amphitheatre, in golden terraces of horsechestnut and beech. The big nuts dropped velvety and brown, as if they had been soaked in oil, and disappeared in the dry leaves below. Little black yew trees, that had not been visible in the green of summer, stood out among the curly yellow brakes. Through the grey netting of the beech twigs, stiff holly bushes glittered.”

— Willa Cather

328. “As he looked out and saw the grey landscape through the gently falling snow, he could not help thinking how much better it would be if people could go to sleep like the fields; could be blanketed down under the snow, to wake with their hurts healed and their defeats forgotten.”

— Willa Cather

329. “At one moment the whole flock of doves caught the light in such a way that they all became invisible at once, dissolved in light and disappeared as salt dissolves in water.”

— Willa Cather

330. “The old man smiled. ‘I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.”

— Willa Cather

331. “As I get older, I leave a good deal more to God. I believe He wants to save whatever is noble in this world, and that He knows more ways of doing it than I... I believe He is sometimes where we would least expect to find Him, – even in proud, rebellious hearts.”

— Willa Cather

332. “Ruin and new birth; the shudder of ugly things in the past, the trembling image of beautiful ones on the horizon; finding and losing; that was life, he saw.”

— Willa Cather

333. “She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true.” – Jim Burden.”

— Willa Cather

334. “He looked at us understandingly, then took grandmother’s hand and bent over it. I noticed how white and well-shaped his own hands were. They looked calm, somehow, and skilled. His eyes were melancholy, and were set back deep under his brow. His face was ruggedly formed, but it looked like ashes – like something from which all the warmth and light had died out.”

— Willa Cather

335. “It wasn’t American to explain yourself; you didn’t have to!”

— Willa Cather

336. “Every morning the sun came up a red ball, quickly drank the dew, and started a quivering excitement in all living things.”

— Willa Cather

337. “It struck him that the seasons sometimes gain by being brought into the house, just as they gain by being brought into painting, and into poetry. The hand, fastidious and bold which selected and placed – it was that which made the difference. In Nature there is no selection.”

— Willa Cather

338. “Ah well, that is a missionary’s life; to plant where another shall reap.”

— Willa Cather

339. “Mrs. Wheeler always feels that God is near, – but Mahailey is not troubled by any knowledge of interstellar spaces, and for her He is nearer still, – directly overhead, not so very far above the kitchen stove.”

— Willa Cather

340. “Father Latour reflected. “And the silver of the Spanish was really Moorish, was it not? If not actually of Moorish make, copied from their design. The Spanish knew nothing of working silver, except as they learned it from the Moors.”

— Willa Cather

341. “The right thing is usually just what everybody don’t do.”

— Willa Cather

342. “Inside of living people, too, captives languished. Yes, inside of people who walked and worked in the broad sun, there were captives dwelling in darkness, never seen from birth to death. Into those prisons the moon shone, and the prisoners crept to the windows and looked out with mournful eyes at the white globe which betrayed no secrets and comprehended all.”

— Willa Cather

343. “The prayers of all good people are good.”

— Willa Cather

344. “Alexandra often said that if her mother were cast upon a desert island, she would thank God for her deliverance, make a garden, and find something to preserve.”

— Willa Cather

345. “He respected faith. As he said, you must respect it or despise it, for there was nothing else to do.”

— Willa Cather

346. “Theoretically he knew that life is possible, may even be pleasant, without joy, without passionate griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to live like that.”

— Willa Cather

347. “There never were such people as the Shimerdas for wanting to give away everything they had.”

— Willa Cather