Top 380 Willa Cather Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “She always kissed one as if she were sadly and wisely sending one away forever.”

— Willa Cather

352. “The Professor made no reply to this. Lillian had been fiercely jealous of Tom Outland. As he left the house, he was reflecting that people who are intensely in love when they marry, and who go on being in love, always meet with something which suddenly or gradually makes a difference. Sometimes it is the children, or the grubbiness of being poor, sometimes a second infatuation. In their own case it had been, curiously enough, his pupil, Tom Outland. St.”

— Willa Cather

353. “For a moment they clung together in the pale, clear square of the west window, as the two natures in one person sometimes meet and cling in a fated hour.”

— Willa Cather

354. “The country girls were considered a menace to the social order. Their beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background. But anxious mothers need have felt no alarm. They mistook the mettle of their sons. The respect for respectability was stronger than any desire in Black Hawk youth. Our.”

— Willa Cather

355. “They had strong, independent natures, both of them. They knew what they liked, and were not always trying to imitate other people. They loved children and animals and music, and rough play and digging in the earth. They liked to prepare rich, hearty food and to.”

— Willa Cather

356. “Anyway, he would never allow one of his horses to be put to such a strain.”

— Willa Cather

357. “When they had all been introduced, Anna, the eldest daughter, who had met me at the door, scattered them gently, and came bringing a white apron which she tied round her mother’s waist.”

— Willa Cather

358. “Her mind was slow, truthful, steadfast. She had not the least spark of cleverness.”

— Willa Cather

359. “She seemed to feel the weight of all the snow that lay down there. The branches had become so hard that they wounded your hand if you but tried to break a twig. And yet, down under the frozen crusts, at the roots of the trees, the secret of life was still safe, warm as the blood in one’s heart; and the spring would come again! Oh, it would come again!”

— Willa Cather

360. “That hour always had the exultation of victory, of triumphant ending, like a hero’s death – heroes who died young and gloriously. It was a sudden transfiguration, a lifting-up of day. How.”

— Willa Cather

361. “I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light and air about me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would only be sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.”

— Willa Cather

362. “On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share – black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.”

— Willa Cather

363. “A child’s attitude toward everything is an artist’s attitude. I am more or less of an artist now, but then I was nothing else.”

— Willa Cather

364. “Thou art the Spring for which I sighed in Winter’s cold embraces.”

— Willa Cather

365. “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

366. “Subsequent experiences with rattlesnakes taught me that my first encounter was fortunate in circumstance. My big rattler was old, and had led too easy a life; there was not much fight in him. He had probably lived there for years, with a fat prairie-dog for breakfast whenever he felt like it, a sheltered home, even an owl-feather bed, perhaps, and he had forgot that the world doesn’t owe rattlers a living.”

— Willa Cather

367. “Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared; the ball dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The fields below us were dark, the sky was growing pale, and that forgotten plough had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie.”

— Willa Cather

368. “It was just this solitariness of love in which a priest’s life could be like his Master’s.”

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

370. “The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him.’ She.”

— Willa Cather

371. “The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand.”

— Willa Cather

372. “At any rate, that is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.” -Jim Burden.”

— Willa Cather

373. “She was alive, and very eager. We were so deep in the grass that we could see nothing but the blue sky over us and the gold tree in front of us. It was wonderfully pleasant.”

— Willa Cather

374. “I remember those girls merely as faces in the schoolroom, gay and rosy, or listless and dull, cut off below the shoulders, like cherubs, by the ink-smeared tops of the high desks that were surely put there to make us round-shouldered and hollow-chested.”

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

376. “Fairly considered, the sewing-room was the most inconvenient study a man could possibly have, but it was the one place in the house where he could get isolation, insulation from the engaging drama of domestic life. No one was tramping over him, and only a vague sense, generally pleasant, of what went on below came up the narrow stairway. There were certainly no other advantages.”

— Willa Cather

377. “So that the grave, with its tall red grass that was never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft gray rivers flowing past it. I never came upon the place without emotion, and in all that country it was the spot most dear to me.”

— Willa Cather

378. “She took off her jacket and sat more at ease in her blouse, of some soft, flimsy silk.”

— Willa Cather

379. “Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons. It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.”

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

381. “I was glad that this project was one of futurity.”

— Willa Cather

382. “Grandmother called my attention to a stout hickory cane, tipped with copper, which hung by a leather thong from her belt. This, she said, was her rattlesnake cane.”

— Willa Cather

383. “I would set down on paper all that I remembered of Antonia if he would do the same. We might, in this way, get a picture of her.”

— Willa Cather

384. “About us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see her face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest, realest face, under all the shadows of women’s faces, at the very bottom of my memory. “I’ll.”

— Willa Cather

385. “Lena slipped her silk sleeves into the jacket I held for her, smoothed it over her person, and buttoned it slowly.”

— Willa Cather

386. “To people off alone, as we were, there is something stirring about finding evidence of human labour and care in the soil of an empty country. It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel differently about the ground you walk over every day.”

— Willa Cather