Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.
--Willa Cather
Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour's household, and, underneath, another- secret and passionate and intense- which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends.
--Willa Cather
Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
--Willa Cather
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
--Willa Cather
It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
--Willa Cather
Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world.
--Willa Cather
Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones.
--Willa Cather
Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.
--Willa Cather
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
--Willa Cather
No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
--Willa Cather
Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family- but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.
--Willa Cather
Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.
--Willa Cather
People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.
--Willa Cather
Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.
--Willa Cather
Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
--Willa Cather
Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
--Willa Cather
Success is never so interesting as struggle.
--Willa Cather
The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
--Willa Cather
The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
--Willa Cather
The great pines stand at a considerable distance from each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks alone. They do not intrude upon each other.
--Willa Cather
The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
--Willa Cather
The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
--Willa Cather
The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life.
--Willa Cather
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
--Willa Cather
There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
--Willa Cather
When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.
--Willa Cather
When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all.
--Willa Cather
Where there is great love there are always miracles.
--Willa Cather
Found 28 occurence(s) in 52,059 quotation(s).