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You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?

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
Cheap
Begin
Must
People
Fret
Successes

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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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Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
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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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Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.
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This is reality, whether you like it or not--all those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.
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There seemed to be nothing to see no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
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I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication.
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Oh, this is the joy of the rose That it blows, And goes.
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The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life.
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Imagination, which is a quality writers must have, does not mean the ability to weave pretty stories out of nothing. In the right sense, imagination is a response to what is going on — a sensitiveness to which outside things appeal. It is a composition of sympathy and observation.
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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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In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.
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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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A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.
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New things are always ugly.
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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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Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.
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No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses.
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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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