Willa Cather Quotes

“I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister – anything that a woman can be to a man. 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.”

“I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man’s jurisdiction.”

“It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.”

“More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure of our childhood.”

“As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.”

“There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”

″‘Oh, better I like to work out-of-doors than in a house!’ she used to sing joyfully. ‘I not care that your grandmother say it makes me like a man. I like to be like a man.‘”

“If she was proud of me, I was so proud of her that I carried my head high as I emerged from the dark cedars and shut the Cutters` gate softly behind me. Her warm, sweet face, her kind arms, and the true heart in her; she was, oh, she was still my Ántonia!”

“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.”

“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.”

″...that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

“Nevertheless, after I went to bed, this idea of punishment and Purgatory came back on me crushingly. I remembered the account of Dives in torment, and shuddered. But Mr. Shimerda had not been rich and selfish: he had only been so unhappy that he could not live any longer.”

“I did not want to find her aged and broken; I really dreaded it. 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 to one again.”

“We’d never have got through it if I hadn’t been so strong.”

“As I confronted her, the changes grew less apparent to me, her identity stronger. She was there, in the full vigor of her personality, battered but not diminished, looking at me, speaking to me in the husky, breathy voice I remembered so well.”

“There was an atmosphere of endeavor, of expectancy and bright hopefulness about the young college that had lifted its head from the prairie only a few years before.”

“That’s Antonia’s failing, you know; if she likes people, she won’t hear anything against them.”

“I know so many women who have kept the things she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded.”

“Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.”

“She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true. I had not been mistaken. She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination...”

“‘I object to every single thing you just said.’”

“‘I know what it’s like to be distracted. To seek out distractions. To exhaust yourself doing every other little thing rather than face a blank page.’”

“In new situations, all the trickiest rules are the ones nobody bothers to explain to you. (And the ones you can’t google.)”

“If we stop to apologize and forgive each other every time we step on each other’s toes, we’ll never have time to be friends.”

“Knowing they were in the same city again made the missing him flare up inside her. In her stomach. Why were people always going on and on about the heart? Almost everything Levi happened in Cath’s stomach.”

“‘I don’t trust anybody. Not anybody. And the more that I care about someone, the more sure I am they’re going to get tired of me and take off.’”

“To really be a nerd, she’d decided, you had to prefer fictional worlds to the real one.”

“‘Think about it, Cath. That’s what makes a god—or a mother. There’s nothing more intoxicating than creating something from nothing. Creating something from yourself.’”

“‘That wasn’t just a kiss, Cather. There was no just.’”

“‘You can stay in this world, this world you love, as long as you want, as long as you keep thinking of new stories—’”