Quote

The trouble is you almost have to marry a man before you can find out the sort of wife he needs and usually it's exactly the sort you are not.

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
Find
Needs
Marry
Men
Exactly
Usually
Trouble
Wife
Sort
Almost

More quotes by Willa Cather

Image
The prayers of all good people are good.
Willa Cather
Image
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.
Willa Cather
Image
More than him has done that, said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.
Willa Cather
Image
The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
Willa Cather
Image
If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be.
Willa Cather
Image
Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine.
Willa Cather
Image
I don't want anyone reading my writing to think about style. I just want them to be in the story.
Willa Cather
Image
The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.
Willa Cather
Image
The test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found out that one can never please the people they wanted to please.
Willa Cather
Image
No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses.
Willa Cather
Image
I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known her about ever since I could remember anything at all.
Willa Cather
Image
Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
Willa Cather
Image
The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.
Willa Cather
Image
The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern.
Willa Cather
Image
It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.
Willa Cather
Image
It is a tragic hour, that hour when we are finally driven to reckon with ourselves, when every avenue of mental distraction has been cut off and our own life and all its ineffaceable failures closes about us like the walls of that old torture chamber of the Inquisition.
Willa Cather
Image
The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death.
Willa Cather
Image
Even the wicked get worse than they deserve.
Willa Cather
Image
Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.
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