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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.

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
Fighting
Found
Decency
Wanted
Stopped
Writing
Caring
Much
Test
Never
Tests
People
Please
Fight

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Today I stood taller from walking among the trees.
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The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.
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I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
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Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.
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There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
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One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days.
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Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
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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.
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[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.
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Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.
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Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
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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.
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The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
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Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.
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It is scarcely exaggeration to say that if one is not a little mad about Balzac at twenty, one will never live and if at forty one can still take Rastignac and Lucien de Rubempre at Balzac's own estimate, one has lived in vain.
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Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
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The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
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Pity is sworn servant unto love: And this be sure, wherever it begin To make the way, it lets your master in.
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Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed.
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This land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces.
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