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

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Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?
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Personal hatred and family affection are not incompatible they often flourish and grow strong together.
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Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
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Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.
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Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.
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When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all.Willa Cather
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One may have staunch friends in one's own family, but one seldom has admirers.
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A creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
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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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life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
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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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I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.
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She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last.
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Where there is great love there are always miracles.
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The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
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Winter lies too long in country towns hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
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Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.
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We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on cigar-box lids.
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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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She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends.
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