491 Quotes by Willa Cather

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.

She asked me whether I had learned to like big cities. 'I'd always be miserable in a city. I'd die of lonesomeness. I like to be where I know every stack and tree, and where all the ground is friendly. I want to live and die here.

I only knew the schoolbooks said he "died in the wilderness, of a broken heart.""More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.

There was about Alexandra something of the impervious calm of the fatalist, always disconcerting to very young people, who cannot feel that the heart lives at all unless it is still at the mercy of storms; unless its strings can scream to the touch of pain.

No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.

Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.

Don't you feel that at this rate there isn't much in it? In what? In living at all, going on as we do. What do we get out of it? Take a day like this: you waken up in the morning and you're glad to be alive; it's a good enough day for anything, and you feel sure something will happen. Well, whether it's a workday or a holiday, it's all the same in the end. At night you go to bed - nothing has happened.

Here, I felt, winter brought no desolation; it was tamed, like a polar bear led on a leash by a beautiful lady.

Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.