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

Willa Cather

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Willa Cather
Age: 73 †
Born: 1873
Born: December 7
Died: 1947
Died: April 24
Author
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Willa Sibert Cather
Inspirational
Measure
Life
Instruments
Achievement
Elements
Foretelling
Magic
Foretell
Creation
Magical
Desire
Instrument
Process
Element

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Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.
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Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.
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The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
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I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
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Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.
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There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back.
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No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses.
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I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything I begin just where I left off.
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I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.
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It is a tragic hour, that hour when we are finally driven to reckon with ourselves, when every avenue of mental distraction has been cut off and our own life and all its ineffaceable failures closes about us like the walls of that old torture chamber of the Inquisition.
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The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.
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Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?
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Money is a protection, a cloak it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity.
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Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
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I've seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too ful of life and love. They can't help it. Poeple come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter.
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The prayers of all good people are good.
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What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
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How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!
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The land belongs to the future.
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One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.
Willa Cather