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Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together.

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
Nothing
Shadow
Reinforced
Something
Short
Endured
Life
Unless
Continually
Went
Shadows
Existence
Background
Came
Backgrounds
Individual
Held
Together
Meant

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Where there is great love there are always miracles.
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After all, the supreme virtue in all art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives art a right to be.
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Look at my papa here he's been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him.
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Money is a protection, a cloak it can buy one quiet, and some sort of dignity.
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youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself betrayed.
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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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There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.
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An artist's saddest secrets are those that have to do with his artistry.
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Late one brilliant April afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson stood at the head of Chestnut Street, looking about him with the pleased air of a man of taste who does not very often get to Boston.
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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.
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Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.
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Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.
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It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled.
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William Tavener never heeded ominous forecasts in the domestic horizon, and he never looked for a storm until it broke.
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The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.
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On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.
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Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.
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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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Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.
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The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.
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