Quote

[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.

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
Fellows
Swore
Still
Letters
Likeable
Years
Mark
Twain
Good
Boys
Deck
Men
Impossible
Thoroughly
Three
Awkward
Hands
Rough
Fellow
Natured
Stills

More quotes by Willa Cather

Image
The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes.
Willa Cather
Image
No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
Willa Cather
Image
Let people go on talking as they like, and we will go on living as we think best.
Willa Cather
Image
Ugly accidents happen . . . always have and always will. But the failures are swept back into the pile and forgotten. They don`t leave any lasting scar in the world, and they don`t affect the future. The things that last are the good things. The people who forge ahead and do something, they really count.
Willa Cather
Image
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.
Willa Cather
Image
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.
Willa Cather
Image
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.
Willa Cather
Image
In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded.
Willa Cather
Image
Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening.
Willa Cather
Image
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.
Willa Cather
Image
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.
Willa Cather
Image
To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent.
Willa Cather
Image
Most publishers, like most writers, are ruined by their successes.
Willa Cather
Image
Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they are in love with somebody.
Willa Cather
Image
It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.
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
Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution. The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark.
Willa Cather
Image
What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
Willa Cather
Image
Pity is sworn servant unto love: And this be sure, wherever it begin To make the way, it lets your master in.
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