491 Quotes by Willa Cather

The Count himself was ready to die, and he would be glad to die here alone, without pretence and mockery, with no troop of expectant relatives about his bed. The world was not what he had thought it at twenty – or even at forty.

Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what’s sensible and what’s foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.

Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world’s hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman’s tenderness.

In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing – desire.

Everything seemed to have succumbed, to have sunk to sleep, under the great, golden, tender, midsummer moon. The splendor of it seemed to transcend human life and human fate. The senses were too feeble to take it in, and every time one looked up at the sky one felt unequal to it, as if one were sitting deaf under the waves of a great river of melody.

Sometimes you will need to be understood; what you never show to anyone will need companionship. And then you must come to me.

As in most families, the mere struggle to have anything of one’s own, to be one’s self at all, creates an element of strain that keeps everybody almost at the breaking point.

I’ve seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too ful of life and love. They can’t help it. Poeple come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter.