Quote

They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.

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
Water
Forests
Littles
Improve
Desecrated
Little
Treated
Ravaged
Needs
Rivers
Bore
Never
Serve
Bores
Would
Neither
Attempting
Took
Forest
Land
Consideration

More quotes by Willa Cather

Image
Sometimes, I ventured, it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her.
Willa Cather
Image
[Mark Twain] is still the rough, awkward, good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands when he was three years old. Thoroughly likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters.
Willa Cather
Image
A work-room should be like an old shoe no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.
Willa Cather
Image
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.
Willa Cather
Image
Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.
Willa Cather
Image
The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.
Willa Cather
Image
I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered –about her teeth for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things she had lost, *but whose inner glow has faded*. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.
Willa Cather
Image
From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.
Willa Cather
Image
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.
Willa Cather
Image
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.
Willa Cather
Image
It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.
Willa Cather
Image
A burnt dog dreads the fire.
Willa Cather
Image
That is happiness to be dissolved into something complete and great.
Willa Cather
Image
The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.
Willa Cather
Image
When the eyes of the flesh are shut, the eyes of the spirit are open.
Willa Cather
Image
Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.
Willa Cather
Image
Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.
Willa Cather
Image
New things are always ugly.
Willa Cather
Image
Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.
Willa Cather
Image
Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world.
Willa Cather