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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

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

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I tell you there is such a thing as creative hate.
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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.
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The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs and usually it's exactly the sort you are not.
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Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.
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The test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.
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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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Success is never so interesting as struggle
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All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.
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The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life.
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[Dawn] is always such a forgiving time. When that first cold, bright streak comes over the water, it's as if all our sins were pardoned as if the sky leaned over the earth and kissed it and gave it absolution.
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Thea was still under the belief that public opinion could be placated that if you clucked often enough, the hens would mistake you for one of themselves.
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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.
Willa Cather
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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
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The two friends stood for a few moments on the windy street corner, not speaking a word, as two travelers, who have lost their way, sometimes stand and admit their perplexity in silence. (O Pioneers!)
Willa Cather
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Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.
Willa Cather
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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.
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All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.
Willa Cather
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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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I have not much faith in women in fiction.... Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.
Willa Cather
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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