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Quotes by Willa Cather

Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
– Willa Cather
Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
– Willa Cather
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
– Willa Cather
I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
– Willa Cather
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
– Willa Cather
No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
– Willa Cather
Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.
– Willa Cather
Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
– Willa Cather
Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
– Willa Cather
That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.
– Willa Cather
The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
– Willa Cather
The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
– Willa Cather
The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
– Willa Cather
The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
– Willa Cather
The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.
– Willa Cather
The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
– Willa Cather
The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world.
– Willa Cather
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
– Willa Cather
There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
– Willa Cather
To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
– Willa Cather
What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
– Willa Cather
When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.
– Willa Cather
Where there is great love there are always miracles.
– Willa Cather
Where there is great love, there are always wishes.
– Willa Cather
Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
– Willa Cather
She used to drag her mattress besider her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with excitement, as a machine vibrates from speed. Life rushed in upon her through that window - or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without. There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that is was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation.
– Willa Cather
It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
– Willa Cather
All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.
– Willa Cather