Quotes by Willa Cather

There was a basic harmony between Antonia and her mistress [Mrs. Harling]. They had strong, independent natures, both of them. They knew what they liked, and were not always trying to imitate other people. They loved children and animals and music, and rough play, and digging in the earth. They liked to prepare rich, hearty food and to see people eat it; to make up soft white beds and to see youngsters asleep in them. They ridiculed conceited people and were quick to help unfortunate ones. Deep down in each of them there was a kind of hearty joviality, a relish of life, not over-delicate, but very invigorating. I never tried to define it, but I was distinctly conscious of it. I could not imagine Antonias living for a week in any other house in Black Hawk than the Harlings.

As he stood there lost in reflection, Auclair thought he seemed more like a man revolving plans for a new struggle with fortune than one looking back upon a life of brilliant features. The Count had the bearing of a fencer when he takes up the foil; from his shoulders to his heels there was intention and direction. His carriage was his unconscious idea of himself, -- it was an armour he put on when he took off his night-cap in the morning, and he wore it all day, at early mass, at his desk, on the march, at the Council, at his dinner-table. Even his enemies relied upon his strength.

I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered-- about her teeth, for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.

He is convinced that the people who might mean something to him will always misjudge him and pass him by. He is not so much afraid of loneliness as he is of accepting cheap substitutes; of making excuses to himself for a teacher who flatters him, of waking up some morning to find himself admiring a girl merely because she is accessible. He has a dread of easy compromises, and he is terribly afraid of being fooled.

The land belongs to the future, Carl; thats the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerks plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brothers children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it--for a little while.

He knew he would always remember her, standing there with that expectant, forward-looking smile, enough to turn the future into summer.

Carl sat musing until the sun leaped above the prairie, and in the grass about him all the small creatures of day began to tune their tiny instruments. Birds and insects without number began to chirp, to twitter, to snap and whistle, to make all manner of fresh shrill noises. The pasture was flooded with light; every clump of ironweed and snow-on-the-mountain threw a long shadow, and the golden light seemed to be rippling through the curly grass like the tide racing in.

He used to say that he never felt the hardness of the human struggle or the sadness of history as he felt it among those ruins. He used to say, too, that it made one feel an obligation to do ones best.

He had never got so much back for himself from any pupil as he did from Miss Kronborg. From the first she had stimulated him; something in her personality invariably affected him. Now that he was feeling his way toward her voice, he found her more interesting than ever before. She lifted the tedium of the winter for him, gave him curious fancies and reveries. Musically, she was sympathetic to him. Why this was true, he never asked himself. He had learned that one must take where and when one can the mysterious mental irritant that rouses ones imagination; that it is not to be had by order. She often wearied him, but she never bored him.

O Sacred Heart of Mary! she murmured by his side, and he felt how that name was food and raiment, friend and mother to her. He received the miracle in her heart into his own, saw through her eyes, knew that his poverty was as bleak as hers. When the Kingdom of Heaven had first come into the world, into a cruel world of torture and slaves and masters, He who brought it had said, And whosoever is least among you, the same shall be first in the Kingdom of Heaven.

Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the worlds hard hand, need, even more than children do, a womans tenderness.

Constant comparisons are the stamp of the foreigner; one continually translates manners and customs of a new country into terms of his own, before he can fully comprehend them.

And I advise ye to think well, he told her Its better to be a stray dog in this world than a man without money. Ive tried it both ways, and I know. A poor man stinks, and God hates him.

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

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

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

But writing is a queer business. If one does anything that is sharp and keep enough to go over the line, to get itself with the work that is taken seriously, one has to have had either an unusual knowledge of or a peculiar sympathy with the characters one handles. One can’t write about what one most admires always—you must, by some accident, have seen into your character very deeply, and it is this accident of intense realization of him that give your writing about him tone and distinction, that lifts it above the commonplace, in other words

Its by understanding me, and the boys, and mother, that you have helped me. I expect that is the only way one person ever really can help another.

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

Either a building is part of a place or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.