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The emptiness was intense, like the stillness in a great factory when the machinery stops running.

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
Great
Machinery
Like
Factories
Stops
Stillness
Emptiness
Intense
Silence
Running
Factory

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This land was an enigma. It was like a horse that no one knows how to break to harness, that runs wild and kicks things to pieces.
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Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.
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Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
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The revolt against individualism naturally calls artists severely to account, because the artist is of all men the most individual those who were not have been long forgotten.
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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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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.
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Alexandra sighed. I have a feeling that if you go away, you will not come back. Something will happen to one of us, or to both. People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find. What I have is yours if you care enough about me to take it.
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The prayers of all good people are good.
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Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere.
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One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away.
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Look at my papa here he's been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him.
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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.
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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?
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I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
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We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it - for a little while.
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Personal hatred and family affection are not incompatible they often flourish and grow strong together.
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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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[Mark Twain] is still the rough, awkward, good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands when he was three years old. Thoroughly likeable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters.
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In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.
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I have not much faith in women in fiction.... Women are so horribly subjective and they have such scorn for the healthy commonplace. When a woman writes a story of adventure, a stout sea tale, a manly battle yarn, anything without wine, women, and love, then I will begin to hope for something great from them, not before.
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