Quotes from Willa Cather

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.

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.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify 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.

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

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

She used to drag her mattress besider her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with excitement, as a machine vibrates from speed. Life rushed in upon her through that window - or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without. There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that is was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation.

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

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

The prayers of all good people are good.

No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses.

One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days.

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

There was a new kind of strength in the gravity of her face, and her colors still gave her that look of deep-seated health and ardor.

Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.

A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.

Prayers said by good people are always good prayers

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

When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.

The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer; it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.

The end is nothing; the road is all.

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.

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

life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

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