Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear ourselves! Until then we have not lived.
You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?
People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.
Merely having seen the season change in a country gave one the sense of having been there for a long time.
The sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.
Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.
Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
After all, the supreme virtue in all art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives art a right to be.
Pity is sworn servant unto love: And this be sure, wherever it begin To make the way, it lets your master in.
A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.
Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.
A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.
In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.
Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones.
Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.
I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known her about ever since I could remember anything at all.
Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.
William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.
On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.
No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses.
To fulfil the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness.
Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.
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.
Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.
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.
One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.
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?
Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.
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.
Setting ... is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.
The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.
Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.
Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.
The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs; and usually it's exactly the sort you are not.
When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all.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.
Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?
Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.
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.
Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone.
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.
I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication.
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.
Thea was still under the belief that public opinion could be placated; that if you clucked often enough, the hens would mistake you for one of themselves.
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.
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.