Quotes from Willa Sibert Cather

The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.

Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding.

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.

If youth did not matter so much to itself it would never have the heart to go on

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

Where there is great love there are always miracles.

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

Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.

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

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.

The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.

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

In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way; but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded.

The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.

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.

I suppose there were moonless nights and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, but I remember them all as flooded with the rich indolence of a full moon.

Make today so awesome that yesterday gets jealous!

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

The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or woman.

[W]hat was any art but an effort to make a sheath, 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?

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.