Willa Cather Quotes

"Where there is great love, there are always miracles." 
"Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen."

Willa Cather

"The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers...I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep." 
"There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm." 
"The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor. " 
"Success is never so interesting as struggle" 
"People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know." 


"That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep." 
"There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before." 


"It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies; our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?" 
"We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever took we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, that exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theaters. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder."