Willa Cather
Willa Cather
Willa Sibert Catherwas an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 December 1873
CountryUnited States of America
humanity sacred brutality
Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.
hurt likes betrayed
youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself betrayed.
girl book character
So long as a novelist works selfishly for the pleasure of creating character and situation corresponding to his own illusions, ideals and intuitions, he will always produce something worth while and natural. Directly he takes himself too seriously and begins for the alleged benefit of humanity an elaborate dissection of complexes, he evolves a book that is more ridiculous and tiresome than the most conventional cold cream girl novel of yesterday.
sunset winter light
The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself.
light air sky
I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light and air abot me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would only be sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.
spring sunshine light
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.
lectures essentials watches
A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.
book wife tables
Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.
paris brave southern
All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.
thinking hands talent
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.
prayer people good-people
The prayers of all good people are good.
people world easier
People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.
giving-up hate sight
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.
mean imagination quality
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.