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
Willa Cather quotes about
paris brave southern
All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.
summer book garden
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.
tree today walking
Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.
growth artistic truthfulness
Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.
boys men hands
[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.
struggle interesting effort
Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
doors land lakes
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.
distance thinking giving
The great pines stand at a considerable distance from each other. Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks alone. They do notintrude upon each other. The Navajos are not much in the habit of giving or of asking help. Their language is not a communicative one, and they never attempt an interchange of personality in speech. Over their forests there is the same inexorable reserve. Each tree has its exalted power to bear.
sea feet skeletons
From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.
women wine adventure
I have not much faith in women in fiction.... Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.
humanity sacred brutality
Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.
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.
long nebraska states
The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.