Willa Cather Quotes

We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.

Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.

If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don't care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.

"In great misfortunes," he told himself, "people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love — if once one has ever fallen in." Falling out, for him, seemed to mean falling out of all domestic and social relations, out of his place in the human family, indeed.

Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.

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

I am sure I do not know why the beauty of Monte Carlo should not satisfy more than it does. The bluest of all seas is nowhere bluer than when you see it between the marble balustrades of the long white terrace before the casino, palms are nowhere greener than in that high garden which the mountain screen from every unkind breath, no colours could be more rich and various than those of the red and purple Alps that tower up behind the town, on whose summit such violent thunderstorms gather and break. But for me, at least, there was not at all the pleasure I had anticipated in this dazzling white and blue, these feathery palms and ragged Alps. ...I had a continual restless feeling that there was nothing at all real about Monte Carlo; that the sea was too blue to be wet, the casino too white to be anything but pasteboard, and that from their very greenness the palms must be cotton. … in atmosphere and spirit the entire kingdom of Monaco is an extension of the casino.

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 did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be, would be

Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.

Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge.

It's awfully easy to rush into a profession you don't really like, and awfully hard to get out of it.

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

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.

In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.