Willa Cather Quotes, Thoughts and Image

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

Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.

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

Success is never so interesting as struggle

What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?

The end is nothing; the road is all.

People always think the bread of another country is better than their own.

Where there is great love there are always miracles.

It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.

Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere.

Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.

Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.

People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.

Life began for me, when I ceased to admire and began to remember.

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

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

Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.

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

There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.

On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.

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

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

Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.

When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.

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

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.

Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.

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.

Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.

The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity.

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

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

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

Some things are best learned in calm, others in storm.