Quotes By 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.

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.

Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.

Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.

The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

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.

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.

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.

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.

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.

Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.

I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.

Where there is great love, there are always wishes.

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.

The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.

It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.

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

Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.

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

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.