Quotes from Willa Cather

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

Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar.

The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.

The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it's exactly the sort you are not.

All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.

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

A soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.

If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago.

A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.

What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, to strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

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

A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.

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

The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.

It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.

Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.

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

The land belongs to the future.

Where there is great love, there are always wishes.