491 Quotes by Willa Cather

Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.

If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift; is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.

Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.

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

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

How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!

He had been to see Mrs. Erlich just before starting home for the holidays, and found her making German Christmas cakes. She took him into the kitchen and explained the almost holy traditions that governed this complicated cookery. Her excitement and seriousness as she beat and stirred were very pretty, Claude thought. She told off on her fingers the many ingredients, but he believed there were things she did not name: the fragrance of old friendships, the glow of early memories, belief in wonder-working rhymes and songs.

A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.

From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted; and nobody knew why.