"It is cremated youth. It is all yours--no one gave it to you."
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Willa Cather quotes (page 8 of 12)
240 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Of course Nebraska is a storehouse of literary material. Everywhere is a storehouse of literary material. If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see."
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"Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?"
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"I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered –about her teeth for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things she had lost, *but whose inner glow has faded*. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life."
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"One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome."
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"Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is."
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"Money is a protection, a cloak; it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity."
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"The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know."
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"People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know."
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"Too much information is rather deadening."
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"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."
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"Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach."
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"I've seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too ful of life and love. They can't help it. Poeple come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter."
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"One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works."
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"Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange."
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"You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?"
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"[Mark Twain] is still the rough, awkward, good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands when he was three years old. Thoroughly likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters."
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"Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best."
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"The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate."
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"Happy people do a great deal for their friends."
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