Willa Cather
The great fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake. The sun rose out of it, the day began there; it was like an open door that nobody could shut. The land and all its dreariness could never close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you would soon be free.Collection: Lakes
Too much information is rather deadening.Collection: Too Much Information
There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.Collection: Country
A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.Collection: Art
The great pines stand at a considerable distance from each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks alone. They do notintrude upon each other. The Navajos are not much in the habit of giving or of asking help. Their language is not a communicative one, and they never attempt an interchange of personality in speech. Over their forests there is the same inexorable reserve. Each tree has its exalted power to bear.Collection: Distance
Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.Collection: Book
Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.Collection: Thinking
Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.Collection: Friendship
After all, the supreme virtue in all art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives art a right to be.Collection: Art
The summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact of the world.Collection: Summer
There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back.Collection: Country
How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!Collection: People
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.Collection: Art
Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.Collection: Tree
Look at my papa here; he's been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him.Collection: Real
Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.Collection: Art
They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.Collection: Land
Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness?Collection: Summer
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.Collection: Writing
Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.Collection: New York
One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.Collection: Book
Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.Collection: Brother
She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last.Collection: Autumn
In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance; from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities.Collection: Country
It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live; and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac's own estimate, one has lived in vain.Collection: Mad
Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding.Collection: Different
To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent.Collection: Artist
The prayers of all good people are good.Collection: Prayer
So long as a novelist works selfishly for the pleasure of creating character and situation corresponding to his own illusions, ideals and intuitions, he will always produce something worth while and natural. Directly he takes himself too seriously and begins for the alleged benefit of humanity an elaborate dissection of complexes, he evolves a book that is more ridiculous and tiresome than the most conventional cold cream girl novel of yesterday.Collection: Girl
I have not much faith in women in fiction.... Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.Collection: Women
Art, it seems to me, should simplify.Collection: Art
Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones.Collection: Father
The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.Collection: People
This land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces.Collection: Running
One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.Collection: Family
Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.Collection: Girl
Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is.Collection: Play
Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.Collection: Ruined
Happy people do a great deal for their friends.Collection: People
We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on cigar-box lids.Collection: People
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.Collection: Writing
The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant on one's back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky.Collection: Eye
Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.Collection: Suffering
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.Collection: May
A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.Collection: Should Have
Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.Collection: Delight
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off.Collection: Thinking
Ugly accidents happen . . . always have and always will. But the failures are swept back into the pile and forgotten. They don`t leave any lasting scar in the world, and they don`t affect the future. The things that last are the good things. The people who forge ahead and do something, they really count.Collection: People
Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.Collection: Past