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One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome.

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
Three
Gardens
Together
Missionary
Book
Rome
Years
Hills
Sabine
Evening
Villa
Garden
Overlooking
Summer
Cardinals
Year
Dining

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If [the writer] achieves anything noble, anything enduring, it must be by giving himself absolutely to his material. And this gift of sympathy is his great gift is the fine thing in him that alone can make his work fine.
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It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.
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Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
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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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I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered –about her teeth for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things she had lost, *but whose inner glow has faded*. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.
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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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The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant on one's back and shoulders, and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky.
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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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What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?
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In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.
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Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.
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Nothing mattered ... but writing books, and living the kind of life that made it possible to write them.
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There was nothing but land not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
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Oh, the Germans classify, but the French arrange.
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Loyal? As loyal as anyone who plays second fiddle ever is.
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From two ears that had grown side by side, the grains of one shot up joyfully into the light, projecting themselves into the future, and the grains from the other lay still in the earth and rotted and nobody knew why.
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To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
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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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I tell you there is such a thing as creative hate.
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I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!
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