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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.

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
Land
Break
Enigma
Running
Harness
Things
Kicks
Like
Runs
Wild
Horse
Pieces

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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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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.
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In a few hours one could cover that incalculable distance from the winter country and homely neighbours, to the city where the air trembled like a tuning-fork with unimaginable possibilities.
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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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The great fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake. The sun rose out of it, the day began there it was like an open door that nobody could shut. The land and all its dreariness could never close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you would soon be free.
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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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Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.
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Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.
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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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Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.
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Of course Nebraska is a storehouse of literary material. Everywhere is a storehouse of literary material. If a true artist were born in a pigpen and raised in a sty, he would still find plenty of inspiration for his work. The only need is the eye to see.
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From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.
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Success is never so interesting as struggle
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The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
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There is something frank and joyous and young in the open face of the country. It gives itself ungrudgingly to the moods of the season, holding nothing back.
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life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
Willa Cather
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Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.
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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?
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Only the stupid and the phlegmatic should teach.
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