491 Quotes by Willa Cather

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.

If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! “A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.

When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all.Willa Cather

When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.

Imagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on — a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation.

In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.

Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.

Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions of them.

Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.