491 Quotes by Willa Cather

I could pick out exactly the right sort of woman for Frank – now. The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it’s exactly the sort you are not. Then what are you going to do about it?” she asked candidly.

It is cremated youth. It is all yours – no one gave it to you.

But this afternoon the closed roads opened, the gates dropped. What she had so often tried to reach, lay under her hand. She had only to touch an idea to make it live.

The test of one’s decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.

There is no God but one God and Art is his revealer; that’s my creed and I’ll follow it to the end, to a hotter place than Pittsburgh if need be.

If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry.

She had seen it when she was at home last summer – the hostility of comfortable, self-satisfied people toward serious effort.

Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife – beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.

I know that I am going away on my own account. I must make the usual effort. I must have something to show for myself. To take what you would give me, I should have to be either a very large man or a very small one, and I am only in the middle class.