Willa Cather Quotes

American - Author December 7, 1873 - April 24, 1947

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

Willa Cather

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

Willa Cather

The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world.

Willa Cather

Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.

Willa Cather

When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.

Willa Cather

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

Willa Cather

What was any art but 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.

Willa Cather

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

Willa Cather

Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.

Willa Cather