Quote

In great misfortunes, people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love--if once one has ever fallen in.

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
Right
Surely
Great
Fallen
Thing
Falling
Love
Greatest
World
Alone
People
Within
Saddest
Fall
Occur
Ever
Misfortunes

More quotes by Willa Cather

Image
Human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them.
Willa Cather
Image
Prayers said by good people are always good prayers
Willa Cather
Image
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.
Willa Cather
Image
In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.
Willa Cather
Image
The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
Willa Cather
Image
Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.
Willa Cather
Image
Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions of them.
Willa Cather
Image
For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.
Willa Cather
Image
If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry
Willa Cather
Image
A child's attitude toward everything is an artist's attitude.
Willa Cather
Image
Merely having seen the season change in a country gave one the sense of having been there for a long time.
Willa Cather
Image
I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known her about ever since I could remember anything at all.
Willa Cather
Image
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
Image
Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.
Willa Cather
Image
Personal hatred and family affection are not incompatible they often flourish and grow strong together.
Willa Cather
Image
Alexandra sighed. I have a feeling that if you go away, you will not come back. Something will happen to one of us, or to both. People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find. What I have is yours if you care enough about me to take it.
Willa Cather
Image
Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere.
Willa Cather
Image
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.
Willa Cather
Image
Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.
Willa Cather
Image
I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.
Willa Cather