Quotes from 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.

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

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

Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man of taste who does not very often get to Boston.

Money is a protection, a cloak; it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity.

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

Where there is great love, there are always wishes.

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.

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

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

Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.

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

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.

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

What was any art but a mold 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.

The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.

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

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

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

If there was a road I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.

He had the uneasy manner of a man who is not among his own kind, and who has not seen enough of the world to feel that all people are in some sense his own kind.

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.

I tell you there is such a thing as creative hate!