Quote

Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.

Willa Cather

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Willa Cather
Age: 73 †
Born: 1873
Born: December 7
Died: 1947
Died: April 24
Author
Biographer
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Willa Sibert Cather
Beneath
Fiction
Grow
Feet
Land
Grows

More quotes by Willa Cather

Image
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.
Willa Cather
Image
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
Willa Cather
Image
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.
Willa Cather
Image
More than him has done that, said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.
Willa Cather
Image
Art, it seems to me, should simplify.
Willa Cather
Image
No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses.
Willa Cather
Image
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.
Willa Cather
Image
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.
Willa Cather
Image
If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago.
Willa Cather
Image
The summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact of the world.
Willa Cather
Image
She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends.
Willa Cather
Image
A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.
Willa Cather
Image
Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.
Willa Cather
Image
Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.
Willa Cather
Image
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.
Willa Cather
Image
Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.
Willa Cather
Image
One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.
Willa Cather
Image
Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions of them.
Willa Cather
Image
If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.
Willa Cather
Image
Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.
Willa Cather