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

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Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.
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Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
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If you love the good thing vitally, enough to give up for it all that one must give up, then you must hate the cheap thing just as hard. I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! “A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.
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I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.
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Winter lies too long in country towns hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
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Success is less interesting than struggle. There is great pleasure in the effort.
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Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.
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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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Every American travelling in England gets his own individual sport out of the toy passenger and freight trains and the tiny locomotives, with their faint, indignant, tiny whistle. Especially in western England one wonders how the business of a nation can possibly be carried on by means so insufficient.
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Merely having seen the season change in a country gave one the sense of having been there for a long time.
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The only thing very noticeable about Nebraska was that it was still, all day long, Nebraska.
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Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world
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Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.
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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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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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I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.
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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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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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Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.
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The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
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