491 Quotes by Willa Cather

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.

For the first time I felt the pull of race and blood and kindred, and felt beating within me things that had not begun with me. It was as if the earth under my feet had grasped and rooted me, and were pouring its essence into me. I sat there until the dawn of morning, and all night long my life seemed to be pouring out of me and running into the ground.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole – so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

Success is never so interesting as struggle.

Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there – that, we may say, is created.

The voice is a wild thing. It can’t be bred in captivity.

Since then she had changed so much in her thoughts, in her ways, even in her looks, that she might wonder she knew herself – except that the changes were all in the direction of becoming more and more herself.

Where there is great love there are always miracles,′ he said at length. ‘One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.

What if – what if Life itself were the sweetheart?