Willa Cather: Trending quotes

“The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.”

Source: Willa Cather in Europe (1956), Ch. 14 (16 September 1902)

“"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.”

Katherine Mansfield (1925)

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

Book III, Ch. 4
The Professor's House (1925)

Willa Cather book Shadows on the Rock

Shadows on the Rock (1931), Book III, Ch. 5

“I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now.”

“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.”

Book 1, Ch. 17
My Antonia (1918)

“As I confronted her, the changes grew less apparent to me, her identity stronger. She was there, in the full vigour of her personality, battered but not diminished, looking at me, speaking to me in the husky, breathy voice I remembered so well.”

"Miss Jewett"; originally published as the Preface to The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925)
Not Under Forty (1936)

“We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it — for a little while.”

Book V, Ch. 1
My Antonia (1918)

Willa Cather book O Pioneers!

Part V, Ch. 3
O Pioneers! (1913)

“Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said… was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?”

Willa Cather book A Lost Lady

A Lost Lady (1923), Part I, Ch. 7

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

“To people off alone, as we were, there is something stirring about finding evidences of human labour and care in the soil of an empty country. It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel differently about the ground you walk over every day.”

Book V, Ch. 1
My Antonia (1918)

“Ain't it wonderful, Jim, how much people can mean to each other?”

Book II, Ch. 2
The Professor's House (1925)

“He had never learned to live without delight. And he would have to learn to, just as, in a Prohibition country, he supposed he would have to learn to live without sherry. Theoretically he knew that life is possible, maybe even pleasant, without joy, without passionate griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to live like that.”

Bok IV, Ch. 4
My Antonia (1918)

“Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.”

Book III, Ch. 4
The Professor's House (1925)

Willa Cather book My Mortal Enemy

Part II, Ch. 1
My Mortal Enemy (1926)

“Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; 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.”

“Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”

On the Art of Fiction"; originally published in The Borzoi 1920 (1920)
Willa Cather on Writing (1949)

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

Book V, Ch. 3
My Antonia (1918)

“The windy springs and the blazing summers, one after another, had enriched and mellowed that flat tableland; all the human effort that had gone into it was coming back in long, sweeping lines of fertility. The changes seemed beautiful and harmonious to me; it was like watching the growth of a great man or of a great idea. I recognized every tree and sandbank and rugged draw. I found that I remembered the conformation of the land as one remembers the modelling of human faces.”

Book I, Ch. 5
The Professor's House (1925)

“Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.”

Book IV, Ch. 3
My Antonia (1918)

“What a thing it is to lie there all day in the fine breeze, with the pine needles dropping on one, only to return to the hotel at night so hungry that the dinner, however homely, is a fete, and the menu finer reading than the best poetry in the world! Yet we are to leave all this for the glare and blaze of Nice and Monte Carlo; which is proof enough that one cannot become really acclimated to happiness. (10 September 1902) in the village of Cavalaire, France.”

Book I, Ch. 1
The Professor's House (1925)