Willa Cather Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

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

“The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.”

“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.”

“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.”

“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”

“The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world.”

“Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.”

“Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.”

“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.”

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