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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?

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
Beautiful
Brilliancy
Women
Coarse
Something
Concealed
Always
Feds
Meant
Whose
Beauty
Secret

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Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions of them.
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Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.
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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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The trees and shrubbery seemed well-groomed and social, like pleasant people.
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Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone.
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In great misfortunes, people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love--if once one has ever fallen in.
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People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.
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Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness.
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Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.
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In Haverford on the Platte the townspeople still talk of Lucy Gayheart.
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Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.
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Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing.
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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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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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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.
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Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
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For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.
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Some things are best learned in calm, others in storm.
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It is easy to pity when once one's vanity has been tickled.
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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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