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Willa Cather

Willa Cather Quotes

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Famous Willa Cather Quotes

“By the time they had called at the baker's and climbed to the top of Cap Diamant, the sun, dropping with incredible quickness, had already disappeared. They sat down in the blue twilight to eat their bread and await the turbid afterglow which is peculiar to Quebec in autumn; the slow, rich, prolonged flowing-back of crimson across the sky, after the sun has sunk behind the dark ridges of the west. Because of the haze in the air the colour seems thick, like a heavy liquid, welling up wave after wave, a substance that throbs, rather than a light.”

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Book:Shadows on the Rock
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“It was in January. A light, sticky snow had fallen irresolutely, at intervals, all day. Toward evening the weather changed; the sun emerged, just sinking over the great pine forest to the west, hung there, an angry ball, and all the snow-covered rock blazed in orange fire. The sun became a half-circle, then a mere red eyebrow, then dropped behind the forest, leaving the air clear blue, and much colder, with a pale lemon moon riding high overhead. There was no wind, it was a night of still moonlight, and within an hour after sunset the wet snow had frozen fast over roofs and spires and trees. Everything on the rock was sheathed in glittering white ice. It was a sight to stir the dullest blood.”

Quebec
Book:Shadows on the Rock
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“Se fosse ancora vivo, tornerei da lui a chiedergli perdono; perché so cosa significa essere vecchi e soli e amareggiati. Sì, cara, perché più invecchiamo, più finiamo col somigliare ai nostri antenati. Ogni giorno che passa, la sua ferocia cresce dentro di me. Da giovani crediamo di essere tanto speciali, siamo convinti che nessuno possa capirci; ma la natura ce l'abbiamo nel sangue, e resta sempre qui, in attesa, come il nostro scheletro.”

VitaIdentitàFamigliaVecchiaiaPerdonoCitazioni In ItalianoPadri
Book:My Mortal Enemy
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“As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose color, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world. In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.”

HeavenChildhood MemoriesBeauty In NatureFarm Life
Book:My Ántonia
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“It has long been a tradition among novel writers that a book must end by everybody getting just what they wanted, or if the conventional happy ending was impossible, then it must be a tragedy in which one or both should die. In real life very few of us get what we want, our tragedies don't kill us, but we go on living them year after year, carrying them with us like a scar on an old wound.”

IfsWantShouldWritingYearsLongBookRealEndsWantedDiesNovelImpossibleGoes OnTraditionTragedyWoundsReal LifeScarConventionalHappy EndingsOld Wounds
Author:Willa Cather
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“It is a tragic hour, that hour when we are finally driven to reckon with ourselves, when every avenue of mental distraction has been cut off and our own life and all its ineffaceable failures closes about us like the walls of that old torture chamber of the Inquisition.”

Has BeensHoursCuttingFailureWallDrivenTortureTragicDistractionChamberAvenuesInquisitionEvery Avenue
Book:The First Willa Cather MEGAPACK®: 50 Classic Short Works
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“The "sayings" of a community, its proverbs, are its characteristic comment upon life; they imply its history, suggest its attitude toward the world and its way of accepting life. Such an idiom makes the finest language any writer can have; and he can never get it with a notebook. He himself must be able to think and feel in that speech - it is a gift from heart to heart.”

ThinkingWorldWayFeelsHeartAbleLanguageCommunityAttitudeAcceptingSpeechCharacteristicsCommentFinestNotebookIdiomHeart To HeartAccepting Life
Book:Not Under Forty
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“Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.”

MeanIndividualNationsSportsWonderEnglandTrainWesternTinyToysPassengersInsufficientIndignantLocomotives
Book:The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews, 1893-1902
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“If the street life, not the Whitechapel street life, but that of the common but so-called respectable part of town is in any city more gloomy, more ugly, more grimy, more cruel than in London, I certainly don't care to see it. Sometimes it occurs to one that possibly all the failures of this generation, the world over, have been suddenly swept into London, for the streets are a restless, breathing, malodorous pageant of the seedy of all nations.”

IfsWorldHas BeensSometimesCareNationsCommonCitiesGenerationsStreetsTownsDon't CareUglyLondonBreathingRestlessRespectableGloomyThis GenerationPageantStreet LifeWhitechapel
Author:Willa Cather
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“No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person. Two people, when they love each other, grow alike in their tastes and habits and pride, but their moral natures (whatever we may mean by that canting expression) are never welded. The base one goes on being base, and the noble one noble, to the end.”

PeopleMayMeanPersonsTwoEndsGrowsMoralSecurityExpressionPrideGoes OnHabitTasteNobleLove Each Other
Book:The Best of Willa Cather
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“Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there - that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.”

GivingWellsFactsMightFeltQualityNovelHeardEmotionalDramaPagesEarsDeedsMoodAurasInexplicableHigh Quality
Book:Not Under Forty
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“The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.”

WritingProcessModernEffectsHigherDrawsPainterNovelistsAccomplishmentDisregardSubordinatesSimplificationUnlearn
Book:Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art
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“There is a popular superstition that "realism" asserts itself in the cataloguing of a great number of material objects, in explaining mechanical processes, the methods of operating manufactories and trades, and in minutely and unsparingly describing physical sensations. But is not realism, more than it is anything else, an attitude of mind on the part of the writer toward his material, a vague indication of the sympathy and candour with which he accepts, rather than chooses, his theme?”

MindProcessNumbersAttitudeAcceptingObjectsMaterialsMethodTradeThemeSensationsSuperstitionsRealismVagueExplainingDescribingIndicationCandour
Book:Not Under Forty
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“Every artist knows that there is no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion.”

KnowsFirstsDoeArtFeelingsArtistCertainImaginationEmotionObjectsKeysCreaturesRelationLaysIntenseLimitationBarriersCompositionSplendidNew WorkDecide Upon
Book:Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art
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“Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.”

PeopleBelieveArtMatterEyeGamesArt IsEarsExcitingNo Matter WhatProductionsPsychologicalConcreteDelightfulMake BelieveSociologicalChildish Things
Book:Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art
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