1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Willa Cather

Willa Cather Quotes
page 2

Willa Sibert Cather was an American writer who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers! , The Song of the Lark , and My Ántonia . In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours , a novel set during World War I.

Cather graduated from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, supporting herself as a magazine editor and high school English teacher. At the age of 33 she moved to New York City, her primary home for the rest of her life, though she also traveled widely and spent considerable time at her summer residence on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick. Wikipedia  

✵ 7. December 1873 – 24. April 1947
Willa Cather photo
Willa Cather: 99   quotes 3   likes

Willa Cather Quotes

“Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.”

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book III, Ch. 4
My Antonia (1918)

Men , Feeling , Home , Time

“Every artist knows that there is no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion.”

Willa Cather

"Light on Adobe Walls"
Willa Cather on Writing (1949)

Truth , Art , Feeling , Imagination

“The great fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake. The sun rose out of it, the day began there; it was like an open door that nobody could shut. The land and all its dreariness could never close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you would soon be free.”

Willa Cather book The Professor's House

Book I, Ch. 1
The Professor's thoughts on Lake Michigan
The Professor's House (1925)

Life , Sun

“When we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord.”

Willa Cather book The Song of the Lark

Part VI, Ch. 2
The Song of the Lark (1915)

Youth , Way

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

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book III, Ch. 4
My Antonia (1918)

Children , Home

“Nothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.”

Willa Cather book The Song of the Lark

Part I, Ch. 11
The Song of the Lark (1915)

Life , People , World

“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 One of Ours

One of Ours (1922), Bk. II, Ch. 6

World , Sun , Animals

“As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world.
In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.”

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book IV, Ch. 4
My Antonia (1918)

World , Way , Mountain , Boy

“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

"Four Letters: Escapism" (1936)
Willa Cather on Writing (1949)

Art , Freedom

“It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live; and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac's own estimate, one has lived in vain.”

Willa Cather

"A Chance Meeting"; first published in The Atlantic Monthly (1933)
Not Under Forty (1936)

Madness

“Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.”

Willa Cather

"Four Letters: Escapism" first published in Commonweal (17 April 1936)
Willa Cather on Writing (1949)

Religion , Art , Spring

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

Willa Cather book Youth and the Bright Medusa

Youth and the Bright Medusa, "A Gold Slipper" (1920)

World , Dreams

“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.”

Willa Cather book The Song of the Lark

Part VI, Ch. 9
The Song of the Lark (1915)

Love , Hate

“In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book V, Ch. 1
My Antonia (1918)

Reality , Memory , Parting

“I think of you more often than of anyone else in this part of the world. I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister — anything that a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.”

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book IV, Ch. 4
My Antonia (1918)

World , Idea , Thinking , Sister

“People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know. We were… A man and woman draw apart from that long embrace, and see what they have done to each other… In age we lose everything; even the power to love.”

Willa Cather book My Mortal Enemy

Part II, Ch. 4
My Mortal Enemy (1926)

Love , People , Age , Lovers

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

Willa Cather

"Four Letters: Escapism" (1936)
Willa Cather on Writing (1949)

People , Thinking

“There's nothing so dangerous as sitting still. You've only got one life, one youth, and you can let it slip through your fingers if you want to; nothing easier. Most people do that.”

Willa Cather book The Bohemian Girl

The Bohemian Girl (1912)

Life , People , Youth

“Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.”

Willa Cather book The Song of the Lark

Part VI, Ch. 11
The Song of the Lark (1915)

Truth , Stupidity , Sense

“Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen. On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice. But in Black Hawk the scene of human life was spread out shrunken and pinched, frozen down to the bare stalk.”

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book II, Ch. 7
My Antonia (1918)

Life , Men , Winter , Weather

“Father Latour judged that, just as it was the white man's way to assert himself in any landscape, to change it, make it over a little (at least to leave some mark of memorial of his sojourn), it was the Indian's way to pass through a country without disturbing anything; to pass and leave no trace, like fish through the water, or birds through the air.
It was the Indian manner to vanish into the landscape, not to stand out against it. The Hopi villages that were set upon rock mesas were made to look like the rock on which they sat, were imperceptible at a distance.”

Willa Cather book Death Comes for the Archbishop

Book VII, Ch. 4
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)

Way , Bird , Fish , Water

“Alexandra drew her shawl closer about her and stood leaning against the frame of the mill, looking at the stars which glittered so keenly through the frosty autumn air. She always loved to watch them, to think of their vastness and distance, and of their ordered march. It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them, she felt a sense of personal security.”

Willa Cather book O Pioneers!

Part I, Ch. 5
O Pioneers! (1913)

Love , Law , Star , Autumn

“Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine.”

Willa Cather

"Four Letters: Escapism" (1936)
Willa Cather on Writing (1949)

Past

“That irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.”

Willa Cather book Death Comes for the Archbishop

Book I, Ch. 3
Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927)

“The years seemed to stretch before her like the land: spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring; always the same patient fields, the patient little trees, the patient lives; always the same yearning; the same pulling at the chain — until the instinct to live had torn itself and bled and weakened for the last time, until the chain secured a dead woman, who might cautiously be released.”

Willa Cather book O Pioneers!

Part IV, Ch. 5
O Pioneers! (1913)

Spring , Autumn , Tree , Winter

“The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.”

Willa Cather

"The Novel Démeublé"
Not Under Forty (1936)

Learning , Drawing

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

Willa Cather book The Song of the Lark

Part II, Ch. 3
The Song of the Lark (1915)

Time