It opened with the melancholy reflection that, in the lives of mortals the best days are the first to flee. ‘Optima dies... prima fugit.’ I turned back to the beginning of the third book, which we had read in class that morning. ‘Primus ego in patriam mecum... deducam Musas’; ’for I shall be the first, if I live, to bring the Muse into my country.

— Willa Cather

Willa Cather Quotes

At one moment the whole flock of doves caught the light in such a way that they all became invisible at once, dissolved in light and disappeared as salt dissolves in water.

— Willa Cather

Every morning the sun came up a red ball, quickly drank the dew, and started a quivering excitement in all living things.

— Willa Cather

According to her conception of education, one should learn, not think; and above all, one must not enquire. The history of the human race, as it lay behind one, was already explained; and so was its destiny, which lay before. The mind should remain obediently within the theological concept of history.

— Willa Cather

That’s a badger hole. He’s about as big as a big ’possum, and his face is striped, black and white. He takes a chicken once in a while, but I won’t let the men harm him. In a new country a body feels friendly to the animals. I like to have him come out and watch me when I’m at work.

— Willa Cather

I have almost become a Mexican! I have learned to like chili colorado and mutton fat. Their foolish ways no longer offend me, their very faults are dear to me. I am their man!

— Willa Cather

As he looked out and saw the grey landscape through the gently falling snow, he could not help thinking how much better it would be if people could go to sleep like the fields; could be blanketed down under the snow, to wake with their hurts healed and their defeats forgotten.

— Willa Cather

One of Ours by Willa Cather Book One: On Lovely Creek I. Claude Wheeler opened his eyes before the sun was up and vigorously shook his younger brother, who lay in the other half of the same bed. “Ralph, Ralph, get awake! Come down and help me wash the car.” “What for?” “Why, aren’t we going to the circus today?

— Willa Cather

He often quoted to his students that passage from their fellow Auvergnat, Pascal: that Man was lost and saved in a garden.

— Willa Cather

Mrs. Wheeler always feels that God is near, – but Mahailey is not troubled by any knowledge of interstellar spaces, and for her He is nearer still, – directly overhead, not so very far above the kitchen stove.

— Willa Cather

Ruin and new birth; the shudder of ugly things in the past, the trembling image of beautiful ones on the horizon; finding and losing; that was life, he saw.

— Willa Cather

He respected faith. As he said, you must respect it or despise it, for there was nothing else to do.

— Willa Cather

With prosperity came a kind of callousness; everybody wanted to destroy the old things they used to take pride in. The orchards, which had been nursed and tended so carefully twenty years ago, were now left to die of neglect. It was less trouble to run into town in an automobile and buy fruit than it was to raise it.

— Willa Cather

As I get older, I leave a good deal more to God. I believe He wants to save whatever is noble in this world, and that He knows more ways of doing it than I... I believe He is sometimes where we would least expect to find Him, – even in proud, rebellious hearts.

— Willa Cather

Things would have been very different with poor Antonia if her father had lived.

— Willa Cather

Do you feel at peace with the world here? I think we shall be very happy. I haven’t any fears. I think when friends marry, they are safe. We don’t suffer like – those young ones.

— Willa Cather

Alexandra often said that if her mother were cast upon a desert island, she would thank God for her deliverance, make a garden, and find something to preserve.

— Willa Cather

He looked at us understandingly, then took grandmother’s hand and bent over it. I noticed how white and well-shaped his own hands were. They looked calm, somehow, and skilled. His eyes were melancholy, and were set back deep under his brow. His face was ruggedly formed, but it looked like ashes – like something from which all the warmth and light had died out.

— Willa Cather

It struck him that the seasons sometimes gain by being brought into the house, just as they gain by being brought into painting, and into poetry. The hand, fastidious and bold which selected and placed – it was that which made the difference. In Nature there is no selection.

— Willa Cather

The past closes up behind one, somehow. One would rather have a new kind of misery. The old kind seems like death or unconsciousness. You can’t force your life back into that mould again. No, one can’t go back.

— Willa Cather

Misfortune seemed to settle like an evil bird on the roof of the log house, and to flap its wings there, warning human beings away.

— Willa Cather
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