Top 380 Willa Cather Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

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

— Willa Cather

355. “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

356. “Everywhere now there was the smell of burning grass.”

— Willa Cather

357. “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

358. “You’ll always remember me when you think about old times, won’t you? And I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people.”

— Willa Cather

359. “The blond cornfields were red gold, the haystacks turned rosy and threw long shadows. The whole prairie was like the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed. 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.”

— Willa Cather

360. “It was just my point that I saw altogether too much of the people we knew. My.”

— Willa Cather

361. “This gossip did not mean that her servants were disloyal, but rather that they were proud of their mistress.”

— Willa Cather

362. “You never really knew a man, he said, until you saw him die. Most men were game, and went without a grudge.”

— Willa Cather

363. “She always kissed one as if she were sadly and wisely sending one away forever.”

— Willa Cather

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

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

— Willa Cather

370. “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

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

— Willa Cather

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

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

— Willa Cather

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

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

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

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

— Willa Cather

386. “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