Willa Cather Quotes

Where there is great love, there are always miracles.

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

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

I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered- about her teeth, for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.

I was entirely happy. 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. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

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

The mind, too, has a kind of blood; in common speech we call it hope.

I shall do nothing to discourage my patient, Monseigneur, any more than I shall bleed him, as many good people urge me to do. The mind, too, has a kind of blood; in common speech we call it hope.

Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding.

Miracles surround us at every turn, if we but sharpen our perceptions to them.

Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.

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.

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.

Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons.

I only knew the schoolbooks said he "died in the wilderness, of a broken heart."

"More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.

What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, to strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

He used to say that he never felt the hardness of the human struggle or the sadness of history as he felt it among those ruins. He used to say, too, that it made one feel an obligation to do one's best.

I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.

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