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f2cf6a1
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There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
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Willa Cather |
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158626b
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The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing -- desire.
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Willa Cather |
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6e85a1c
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Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
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Willa Cather |
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4ad9589
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I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
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nature
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Willa Cather |
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95bb6bb
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It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies; our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?
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friendship
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Willa Cather |
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8b5b13f
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People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again--but it finds a tougher surface.
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Willa Cather |
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65013fc
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That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
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Willa Cather |
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ee86dd7
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Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.
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life
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Willa Cather |
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fe93b56
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Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
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Willa Cather |
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659d33f
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Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.
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Willa Cather |
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76a49fe
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The old man smiled. 'I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.
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Willa Cather |
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36c2ea7
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Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
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Willa Cather |
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3571474
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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.
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part-ii
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Willa Cather |
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8fae888
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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 that 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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living
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Willa Cather |
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ad87850
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I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister--anything a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.
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Willa Cather |
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723e237
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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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Willa Cather |
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5665bcb
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People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.
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Willa Cather |
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afe7225
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I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air. or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
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Willa Cather |
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8da53c7
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But she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in..
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Willa Cather |
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c8c279a
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Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
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Willa Cather |
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796dc88
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I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light and air abot me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would only be sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.
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Willa Cather |
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802a42b
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Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.
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woman
suffering
virgin-mary
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Willa Cather |
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89bfe03
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There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
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life
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Willa Cather |
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a4cb835
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Sometimes," I ventured, "it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her..."
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Willa Cather |
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72aae43
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The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me. In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen again.
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Willa Cather |
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9fd2444
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If there were no girls like them in the world, there would be no poetry
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Willa Cather |
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d15850b
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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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Willa Cather |
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39be351
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The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundereds of times when I dont realize it. You really are a part of me.
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Willa Cather |
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a34966d
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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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Willa Cather |
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bc0d107
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The new country lay open before me: there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in ..
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mormons
sunflowers
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Willa Cather |
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47c449b
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No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
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Willa Cather |
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b237823
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Where there is great love there are always miracles,' he said at length. 'One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love. I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you. The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment ou..
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Willa Cather |
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56e155d
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Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons.
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prairie
trees
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Willa Cather |
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9bca563
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Freedom so often means that one isn't needed anywhere.
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Willa Cather |
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c9c8045
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I've seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too ful of life and love. They can't help it. Poeple come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter.
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Willa Cather |
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0109311
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Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.
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friendship
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Willa Cather |
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4403908
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I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.
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Willa Cather |
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e9ef580
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The land belongs to the future, Carl; that's the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk's plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it--for a little while.
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prairie
land
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Willa Cather |
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e5752b2
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Many a night that summer she left Dr. Archie's office with a desire to run and run about those quiet streets until she wore out her shoes, or wore out the streets themselves; when her chest ached and it seemed as if her heart were spreading all over the desert. When she went home, it was not to go to sleep. She used to drag her mattress beside her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with excitement, as a machine vibrates fr..
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Willa Cather |
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ae6d701
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We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever took we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, that exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the..
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Willa Cather |
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545725a
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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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Willa Cather |
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e0189b7
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Alexandra drew her shawl closer about her and stood leaning against the frame of the mill, looking at the stars which glittered so keenly through the frosty autumn air. She always loved to watch them, to think of their vastness and distance, and of their ordered march. It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them, she felt a sense of personal security. That night she h..
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Willa Cather |
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2abd9fd
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Antonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade - that grew stronger with time. In my memory there was a succession of such pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts of one's first primer...She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true...She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still s..
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Willa Cather |
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0d1e51c
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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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Willa Cather |