110+ Willa Cather Quotes On Land, Writing And Prairie

Willa Cather was an American author who wrote about the American West. She is best known for her novels about the immigrant experience, such as My Antonia and O Pioneers! She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1923 for her novel One of Ours. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Willa Cather on land, writing, prairie.

Top 10 Willa Cather Quotes

1. The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.
2. Success is never so interesting as struggle
3. There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
4. Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.
5. Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
6. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.
7. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
8. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
9. Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
10. Where there is great love there are always miracles.

Willa Cather Image Quotes

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm. — Willa Cather

Willa Cather Short Quotes

• I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
• Where there is great love, there are always miracles.
• I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
• Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
• life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
• Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.
• The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
• The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity.
• The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.
• When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.

Willa Cather Quotes About Land

There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. — Willa Cather

The land belongs to the future. — Willa Cather

There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. — Willa Cather

The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. — Willa Cather

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. — Willa Cather

Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet. — Willa Cather

They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it. — Willa Cather

This land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces. — Willa Cather

Willa Cather Quotes About Writing

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. — Willa Cather

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies. — Willa Cather

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. — Willa Cather

Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them. — Willa Cather

The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect. — Willa Cather

Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world. — 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

I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story. — Willa Cather

If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago. — Willa Cather

Willa Cather Quotes About Left

When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless. — Willa Cather

The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world. — 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

There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon. — Willa Cather

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off. — Willa Cather

Willa Cather Quotes About Talent

All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens. — Willa Cather

In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever. — Willa Cather

Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke. — Willa Cather

The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand. — Willa Cather

To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. — Willa Cather

Willa Cather Quotes About Dissolved

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. — Willa Cather

That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great. — Willa Cather

That is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great. — Willa Cather

Willa Cather Famous Quotes And Sayings

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm. — Willa Cather

What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose. — Willa Cather

The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer; it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic. — 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

Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar. — Willa Cather

When we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord. — Willa Cather

One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days. — Willa Cather

Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves. — 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. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody. — Willa Cather

The great fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake. The sun rose out of it, the day began there; it was like an open door that nobody could shut. The land and all its dreariness could never close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you would soon be free. — Willa Cather

I suppose there were moonless nights and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, but I remember them all as flooded with the rich indolence of a full moon. — 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. — Willa Cather

Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. — Willa Cather

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. — Willa Cather

Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. — 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

Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton. — Willa Cather

The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant on one's back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky. — Willa Cather

The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter. — Willa Cather

Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar. — Willa Cather

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

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers. — Willa Cather

A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves. — Willa Cather

Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient. — Willa Cather

The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska. — Willa Cather

It is a tragic hour, that hour when we are finally driven to reckon with ourselves, when every avenue of mental distraction has been cut off and our own life and all its ineffaceable failures closes about us like the walls of that old torture chamber of the Inquisition. — Willa Cather

Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world — Willa Cather

Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection. — Willa Cather

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

The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman. — Willa Cather

Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past. — Willa Cather

She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. — Willa Cather

Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere. — Willa Cather

In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way; but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded. — Willa Cather

Ugly accidents happen . . . always have and always will. But the failures are swept back into the pile and forgotten. They don`t leave any lasting scar in the world, and they don`t affect the future. The things that last are the good things. The people who forge ahead and do something, they really count. — Willa Cather

There was only - spring itself, the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere; in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm high wind - rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive ... If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring. — Willa Cather

The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern. — Willa Cather

The two friends stood for a few moments on the windy street corner, not speaking a word, as two travelers, who have lost their way, sometimes stand and admit their perplexity in silence. (O Pioneers!) — Willa Cather

Imagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on — a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation. — Willa Cather

Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything. — Willa Cather

If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! “A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be. — Willa Cather

[Dawn] is always such a forgiving time. When that first cold, bright streak comes over the water, it's as if all our sins were pardoned; as if the sky leaned over the earth and kissed it and gave it absolution. — Willa Cather

The air and the earth interpenetrated in the warm gusts of spring; the soil was full of sunlight, and the sunlight full of red dust. The air one breathed was saturated with earthy smells, and the grass under foot had a reflection of the blue sky in it. — Willa Cather

There was a new kind of strength in the gravity of her face, and her colors still gave her that look of deep-seated health and ardor. — Willa Cather

It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled. — Willa Cather

Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man of taste who does not very often get to Boston. — Willa Cather

Look at my papa here; he's been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him. — Willa Cather

A soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup. — Willa Cather

Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine. — Willa Cather

One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers. — Willa Cather

One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome. — Willa Cather

Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is. — Willa Cather

Prayers said by good people are always good prayers — Willa Cather

Sometimes," I ventured, "it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her. — Willa Cather

In great misfortunes, people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love--if once one has ever fallen in. — Willa Cather

No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses. — Willa Cather

Of course Nebraska is a storehouse of literary material. Everywhere is a storehouse of literary material. If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see. — Willa Cather

Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret? — Willa Cather

Happy people do a great deal for their friends. — Willa Cather

[Mark Twain] is still the rough, awkward, good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands when he was three years old. Thoroughly likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters. — Willa Cather

The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate. — Willa Cather

Youth, art, love, dreams, true-heartedness - why must they go out of the summer world into darkness? — Willa Cather

In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching. — Willa Cather

New things are always ugly. — Willa Cather

Where there is great love, there are always wishes. — Willa Cather

Too much information is rather deadening. — Willa Cather

I've seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too ful of life and love. They can't help it. Poeple come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter. — Willa Cather

The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know. — Willa Cather

A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one. — Willa Cather

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. — Willa Cather

In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart. — Willa Cather

Life Lessons by Willa Cather

1. Willa Cather taught the importance of living life to its fullest, taking risks and embracing change. She also emphasized the importance of maintaining a strong connection to one's roots and the beauty of nature.
2. Cather also demonstrated the power of resilience and the strength of the human spirit, reminding us that no matter what life throws at us, we can always find a way to persevere.
3. Finally, Cather showed us the importance of self-expression, encouraging us to find our own voice and use it to tell our stories.