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

More quotes by Willa Cather

Image
The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
Willa Cather
Image
They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.
Willa Cather
Image
Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.
Willa Cather
Image
To fulfil the dreams of one's youth that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.
Willa Cather
Image
Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine.
Willa Cather
Image
You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?
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
A watch is the most essential part of a lecture.
Willa Cather
Image
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.
Willa Cather
Image
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.
Willa Cather
Image
Setting ... is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.
Willa Cather
Image
Now that Stevenson is dead I can think of but one English- speaking author who is really keeping his self-respect and sticking forperfection. Of course I refer to that mighty master of language and keen student of human actions and motives, Henry James.
Willa Cather
Image
It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?
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. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.
Willa Cather
Image
There was only - spring itself, the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm high wind - rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive ... If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring.
Willa Cather
Image
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.
Willa Cather
Image
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
Willa Cather
Image
youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself betrayed.
Willa Cather
Image
Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
Willa Cather
Image
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.
Willa Cather