Quotes from Willa Cather

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

I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!

Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.

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

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.

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.

Success is never so interesting as struggle

To fulfil the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.

Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.

Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.

What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?

Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.

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

Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.

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

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

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

When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.

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

People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.

Merely having seen the season change in a country gave one the sense of having been there for a long time.

The summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact of the world.

Setting ... is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.

From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.