Some things are best learned in calm, others in storm. Willa Cather More Quotes by Willa Cather More Quotes From 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 perfect writing years A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude. Willa Cather attitude children art People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface. Willa Cather surface pain people Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet. Willa Cather land feet fiction In New Mexico, he always awoke a young man, not until he arose and began to shave did he realize that he was growing older. His first consciousness was a sense of the light dry wind blowing in through the windows, with the fragrance of hot sun and sage-brush and sweet clover; a wind that made one's body feel light and one's heart cry 'To-day, to-day,' like a child's. Willa Cather sweet love children The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is. Willa Cather truth beautiful life There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. Willa Cather creeks land country How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives! Willa Cather terrible share people Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer. Willa Cather divine suffering knows 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 quests desire might Today I stood taller from walking among the trees. Willa Cather walking tree today Oh, this is the joy of the rose; Willa Cather flower blow rose Personal hatred and family affection are not incompatible; they often flourish and grow strong together. Willa Cather family strong hatred A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves. Willa Cather imagination should-have ideas 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 she had lost, *but whose inner glow has faded*. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life. Willa Cather teeth fire thinking 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 garden summer book Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. Willa Cather truthfulness artistic growth But she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. 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. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions. It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races. Willa Cather strong heart son One realizes that 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. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works. Willa Cather grandmother husband children 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 writing character lying
