Willa Cather

“What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, to strong to stop, too sweet to lose.”

“It seems to me that the pleasure one feels in a work of art is just one thing that one does not have to explain.”

“Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.”

“Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.”

“It's by understanding me, and the boys, and mother, that you have helped me. I expect that is the only way one person ever really can help another.”

“Either a building is part of a place or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.”

“The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”

“A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.”

“Where there is great love, there are always miracles.”

“The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.”

“The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.”

“The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.”

“The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.”

“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.”

“As in most families, the mere struggle to have anything of one's own, to be one's self at all, creates an element of strain that keeps everybody almost at the breaking point.”

“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 that she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.”

“Constant comparisons are the stamp of the foreigner; one continually translates manners and customs of a new country into terms of his own, before he can fully comprehend them.”

“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

“He had never got so much back for himself from any pupil as he did from Miss Kronborg. From the first she had stimulated him; something in her personality invariably affected him. Now that he was feeling his way toward her voice, he found her more interesting than ever before. She lifted the tedium of the winter for him, gave him curious fancies and reveries. Musically, she was sympathetic to him. Why this was true, he never asked himself. He had learned that one must take where and when one can the mysterious mental irritant that rouses one's imagination; that it is not to be had by order. She often wearied him, but she never bored him.”

“Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.”