Quote

The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.

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
Littles
Little
Human
Humans
Thing
Life
World
Bigs
People
Desire

More quotes by Willa Cather

Image
I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!
Willa Cather
Image
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
Willa Cather
Image
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.
Willa Cather
Image
The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
Willa Cather
Image
In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded.
Willa Cather
Image
Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.
Willa Cather
Image
A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
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
The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
Willa Cather
Image
I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.
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
life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
Willa Cather
Image
Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.
Willa Cather
Image
Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement.
Willa Cather
Image
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.
Willa Cather
Image
We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it - for a little while.
Willa Cather
Image
Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.
Willa Cather
Image
There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
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
Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.
Willa Cather