Willa Cather Quotes

“Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.”
― Willa Cather

“But the life of a Willa Cather, a Lillian Helman, and Virginia Woolf - - - would it not be a series of rapid ascents and probing descents into shades and meanings — into more people, ideas and conceptions? Would it not be in color, rather than black-and-white, or more gray? I think it would. And thus, I not being them, could try to be more like them: to listen, observe, and feel, and try to live more fully.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“she wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson…" "No, living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway—a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe—all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Tender Is the Night. I really like Willa Cather. Have you read My Mortal Enemy?" With no particular expression, she said, "Actually, I wrote it.”
― Truman Capote, Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote

“At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“Thackeray's a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was an extremely good writer and Willa Cather was a great artist.”
― Truman Capote, Conversations with Capote

“Miracles surround us at every turn, if we but sharpen our perceptions to them.”
― Willa Cather

“This is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“Art, like Nebraska, is a journey into thin air, a walk into whiteness, where you lose everything but yourself.”
― Joan Acocella, Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism

“She was struggling with something she had never felt before. A new conception of art? It came closer than that. A new kind of personality? But it was much more. It was a discovery about life, a revelation of love as a tragic force, not a melting mood, of passion that drowns like black water.”
― Willa Cather, Lucy Gayheart

“There had been that one month, to be sure, when she lived under a golden canopy among spring flowers, while the March winds and rain threatened outside the windows. Then she was never afraid of cruel surprises. Perhaps that was all she was to have in this world; some people got very little. It was strange, to feel everything slipping away from one and to have no power to struggle, no right to complain. One had to sit with folded hands and see it all go. You couldn't, after all, live above your level: with good luck you might, for a few breaths, hold yourself up in that more vital air, but you dropped back; down, down into flatness, and it was worse than if you had never been out of it.”
― Willa Cather, Lucy Gayheart

“In little towns, lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching. On the sidewalks along which everybody comes and goes, you must, if you walk abroad at all, at some time pass within a few inches of the man who cheated and betrayed you, or the woman you desire more than anything else in the world. Her skirt brushes against you. You say good-morning, and go on. It is a close shave. Out in the world the escapes are not so narrow.”
― Willa Cather, Lucy Gayheart

“It had happened in a street in New Orleans. He had turned a corner and come upon an old woman with a basket of yellow flowers; sprays of yellow sending out a honey-sweet perfume. Mimosa--but before he could think of the name he was overcome by a feeling of place, was dropped, cassock and all, into a garden in the south of France where he had been sent one winter in his childhood to recover from an illness. And now this silvery bell note had carried him farther and faster than sound could travel.”
― Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather