Willa Sibert Cather (1873–1947,) born Wilella Cather, was a novelist and short-story writer considered one of the greatest twentieth-century American authors. Her works explore the pioneer spirit: love of the land, loyalty to family, and the struggle with nature. Her books, often portraying strong characters who lead a life as a noble endeavor, are renowned for their energetic and sensitive evocations of prairie life in the twilight years of the Midwestern frontier.
Cather was born in Back Creek Valley, Virginia. Her family moved to a farm in Nebraska. The splendor of the prairie and her friendships with Bohemian and Scandinavian immigrant-farmer families provided her with both the material and an unadorned manner of expression she later used in her novels. Cather started college at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, set on becoming a doctor. She decided to become a writer after one of her professors sent in an essay of hers without her knowledge, and it was published.
Cather first worked as an editor, drama critic, and high school teacher in Pittsburgh. In 1904, she relocated to New York City, where she published her first collection of short stories, The Troll Garden (1905,) and became managing editor of McClure’s Magazine. Her works include O Pioneers! (1913,) My Antonia (1918,) One of Ours (1922; Pulitzer,) The Professor’s House (1925,) and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927,) generally regarded as her masterpiece.
In her final years, Cather devoted herself to literary criticism. Not Under Forty (1936) contains an eloquent expression of her philosophy of writing; this tome is also known for Cather’s debt to another pioneer, the novelist Sarah Orne Jewett.
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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.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Life, Storytelling, Man
Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Memories, Memory, Reality
That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Happiness, Joy
The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Generations
The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Girls
The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world.
—Willa Cather
Money is a protection, a cloak; it can buy one quiet and some sort of dignity.
—Willa Cather
Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Seasons, Winter
Wherever humanity has made that hardest of all starts and lifted itself out of mere brutality is a sacred spot.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Humanity
Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand—a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods—or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers, Writing
Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.
—Willa Cather
Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family —but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Friendship, Solitude, Friends and Friendship
Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn’t want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Idealism, Ideals
The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Censorship
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 our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Miracles
To note an artist’s limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Writers, Writing, Authors & Writing
Alcohol is perfectly consistent in its effects upon man. Drunkenness is merely an exaggeration. A foolish man drunk becomes maudlin; a bloody man, vicious; a coarse man, vulgar.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Exaggeration
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.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Belief, Art
I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Death
There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Learning
The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Talent
Where there is great love, there are always miracles.
—Willa Cather
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
Topics: Authors & Writing, Simplicity
What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself.
—Willa Cather
Give the people a new word and they think they have a new fact.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Words
Prayers said by good people are always good prayers.
—Willa Cather
This mesa plain had an appearance of great antiquity, and of incompleteness; as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau. The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape.
—Willa Cather
Topics: America
If youth did not matter so much to itself it would never have the heart to go on
—Willa Cather
Topics: Youth
Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Artists, Arts, Art
Sometimes a neighbor whom we have disliked a lifetime for his arrogance and conceit lets fall a single commonplace remark that shows us another side, another man, really; a man uncertain, and puzzled, and in the dark like ourselves.
—Willa Cather
Topics: Neighbors
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