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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.

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
Past
Loses
Hurrying
Life
Stop
Mould
Moment
Elusive
Strong
Element
Running
Shining
Away
Elements
Moments
Sweet
Art
Lose
Imprison

More quotes by Willa Cather

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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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Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
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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.
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Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing.
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person. Two people, when they love each other, grow alike in their tastes and habits and pride, but their moral natures (whatever we may mean by that canting expression) are never welded. The base one goes on being base, and the noble one noble, to the end.
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If youth did not matter so much to itself, it would never have the heart to go on.
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A work-room should be like an old shoe no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.
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In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.
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There was nothing but land not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
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From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted and nobody knew why.
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The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.
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Imagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on — a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation.
Willa Cather
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Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.
Willa Cather
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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.
Willa Cather
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There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.
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Every artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.
Willa Cather
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A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.
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Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.
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There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
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The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
Willa Cather