Quote

Thea was still under the belief that public opinion could be placated that if you clucked often enough, the hens would mistake you for one of themselves.

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
Often
Stills
Still
Adaptability
Enough
Hens
Would
Mistake
Thinking
Opinion
Public
Belief

More quotes by Willa Cather

Image
When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them.
Willa Cather
Image
The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.
Willa Cather
Image
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
Image
Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
Willa Cather
Image
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
Willa Cather
Image
The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.
Willa Cather
Image
I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!
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 sincerity of feeling that is possible between a writer and a reader is one of the finest things I know.
Willa Cather
Image
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.
Willa Cather
Image
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
Image
Sometimes, I ventured, it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her.
Willa Cather
Image
Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.
Willa Cather
Image
One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.
Willa Cather
Image
She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends.
Willa Cather
Image
I suppose there were moonless nights and dark ones with but a silver shaving and pale stars in the sky, but I remember them all as flooded with the rich indolence of a full moon.
Willa Cather
Image
Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.
Willa Cather
Image
The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.
Willa Cather
Image
Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
Willa Cather
Image
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.
Willa Cather