Willa Cather Quotes

If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.

At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.

One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days...

Success is never so interesting as struggle

You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?

But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.

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

No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.

The old man smiled. 'I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.

She remembered home as a place where there were always too many children, a cross man and work piling up around a sick woman.

Antonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade - that grew stronger with time. In my memory there was a succession of such pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts of one's first primer...She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true...She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture...All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions.

Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness.

When I’m in normal health, I’m a Presbyterian, but just now I feel that even the wicked get worse than they deserve.

From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas. (16 September 1902)

Yes, there would be a dirty way out of life, if one chose to take it. But she did not want to die. She wanted to live and dream - a hundred years, forever! As long as this sweetness welled up in her heart, as long as her breast could hold this treasure of pain! She felt as the pond must feel when it held the moon like that; when it encircled and swelled with that image of gold.