491 Quotes by Willa Cather

It’s not a pleasant place to be lying while the world is moving and doing and bettering... but it rather seems as though we ought to go back to the place we came from in the end.

Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world.

Everything showed him to be a man of gentle birth – brave, sensitive, courteous. His manners, even when he was alone in the desert, were distinguished. He had a kind of courtesy toward himself, toward his beasts, toward the juniper tree before which he knelt, and the God whom he was addressing.

As I sat down to my book at last, my old dream about Lena coming across the harvest-field in her short skirt seemed to me like the memory of an actual experience. It floated before me on the page like a picture, and underneath it stood the mournful line: ‘Optima dies... prima fugit.

I don’t want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.

When one danced with them, their bodies never moved inside their clothes; their muscles seemed to ask but one thing – not to be disturbed.

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

Her voice had a peculiarly engaging quality; it was deep, a little husky, and one always heard the breath vibrating behind it. Everything she said seemed to come right out of her heart. One.

He was ready to give up, he felt. He did not know how it had come about, but he was quite willing to go deep under his fields and rest, where the plow could not find him. He was tired of making mistakes. He was content to leave the tangle to other hands;.