Quote

It takes a great deal of experience to become natural.

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
Deals
Takes
Natural
Experience
Become
Great
Deal

More quotes by Willa Cather

Image
Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.
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
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything I begin just where I left off.
Willa Cather
Image
Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
Willa Cather
Image
I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!
Willa Cather
Image
To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent.
Willa Cather
Image
youth, when it is hurt, likes to feel itself betrayed.
Willa Cather
Image
Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones.
Willa Cather
Image
Personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer.
Willa Cather
Image
How terrible it was to love people when you could not really share their lives!
Willa Cather
Image
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there — that, one might say, is created.
Willa Cather
Image
What if - what if Life itself were the sweetheart?
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
The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
Willa Cather
Image
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
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
Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?
Willa Cather
Image
The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
Willa Cather
Image
More than him has done that, said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.
Willa Cather
Image
For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.
Willa Cather