Willa Cather was born in 1875 on a small farm close to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. She was the eldest of seven children born to Charles Cather, a deputy Sheriff and struggling entrepreneur, and Mary Virginia Boak Cather. The family's Irish ancestors had settled in Pennsylvania in the 1750s, and Willa cut her hair short and wore trousers to her fashionable mother's chagrin. In 1883 the Cather family moved to join Willa's grandparents in Webster County, Nebraska. A year later they moved to Red Cloud, a nearby railroad town, where Willa met Annie Sadilek, whom she later used as the model for My Antonia. Willa attended the University of Nebraska, where she edited the school magazine and contributed to local papers. In 1892 she published her short story "Peter" in a Boston magazine, a story that later became part of her novel My Antonia. After graduation in 1895, became an editor at Home Monthly in Pittsburgh. Her short stories were ultimately published in a collection called `The Troll Garden' in 1905, which brought her to the attention of S.S. McClure. In 1906 she moved to New York to join McClure's Magazine, eventually becoming its managing editor. Over the next two decades, she published such prolific works as 'O Pioneers' reflected the personal despair that followed her commercial success. Willa once said that she belonged to a world that had split in two and, as a woman of two centuries - the conservative 19th and the modern 20th - she bridged the large gap between traditional culture and the uneasy Americanism of new immigrants. She had a keen eye for new-century changes, writing about the most intimate pictures of the inner setting: the heart, the soul, the home. Though there is speculation about Cather's personal relationships with other women, her intimate connections with friends are found in the intense human interactions and nature imagery of her work. She maintained an active writing career, publishing novels and short stories until her death, whereupon she ordered her letters burned and was buried in New Hampshire.
American author.
Inducted into the National Womens Hall of Fame in 1988.
Inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in 1974.
Where there is great love, there are always wishes.
The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.
Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever,happen to one again.
If youth did not matter so much to itself it would never have the heart,to go on.
The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the,great artist, knows how difficult it is.
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the,age of fifteen.
]on love] From the beginning women understand devotion, it is a natural,grace with them; they have only to learn where to direct it.
[on spirit] That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete,and great.
As one grows older, one cares less about clever writing and more about a,simple and faithful presentation. But to reach this, one must have gone,through the period where one dies, so to speak, for the fine phrase.
[from a letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher]] My familiar spirit is like,an old, wild turkey that forsakes a feeding ground as soon as it sees,tracks of people - especially if the people are readers, book-buyers.
[from a letter to Stephen Tennant] Nearly all my books are made out of,old experiences that have had time to season. Memory keeps what is,essential and lets the rest go. I am always afraid of writing too much,- of making stories that are like rooms full of things and people, with,not enough air in them.
Where there is great love, there are always miracles.
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
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.
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.
That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
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.
I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people.
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 not to rest 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.
Religion is different from everything else because in religion seeking is finding.
What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, to strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
It seems to me that the pleasure one feels in a work of art is just one thing that one does not have to explain.
There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.
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.
After that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only—spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring.
I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin. There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows, full of fruit. I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected the berries and ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines. The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground. There in the sheltered draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave. The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. 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.
I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.
I only knew the schoolbooks said he "died in the wilderness, of a broken heart. ""More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.
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.
As he stood there lost in reflection, Auclair thought he seemed more like a man revolving plans for a new struggle with fortune than one looking back upon a life of brilliant features. The Count had the bearing of a fencer when he takes up the foil; from his shoulders to his heels there was intention and direction. His carriage was his unconscious idea of himself, -- it was an armour he put on when he took off his night-cap in the morning, and he wore it all day, at early mass, at his desk, on the march, at the Council, at his dinner-table. Even his enemies relied upon his strength.
He is convinced that the people who might mean something to him will always misjudge him and pass him by. He is not so much afraid of loneliness as he is of accepting cheap substitutes; of making excuses to himself for a teacher who flatters him, of waking up some morning to find himself admiring a girl merely because she is accessible. He has a dread of easy compromises, and he is terribly afraid of being fooled.
He knew he would always remember her, standing there with that expectant, forward-looking smile, enough to turn the future into summer.
Carl sat musing until the sun leaped above the prairie, and in the grass about him all the small creatures of day began to tune their tiny instruments. Birds and insects without number began to chirp, to twitter, to snap and whistle, to make all manner of fresh shrill noises. The pasture was flooded with light; every clump of ironweed and snow-on-the-mountain threw a long shadow, and the golden light seemed to be rippling through the curly grass like the tide racing in.
O Sacred Heart of Mary!" she murmured by his side, and he felt how that name was food and raiment, friend and mother to her. He received the miracle in her heart into his own, saw through her eyes, knew that his poverty was as bleak as hers. When the Kingdom of Heaven had first come into the world, into a cruel world of torture and slaves and masters, He who brought it had said, "And whosoever is least among you, the same shall be first in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Constant comparisons are the stamp of the foreigner; one continually translates manners and customs of a new country into terms of his own, before he can fully comprehend them.
Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.
The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing — desire.
Either a building is part of a place or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.
Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.
However much they may smile at her, the old inhabitants would miss Tillie. Her stories give them something to talk about and to conjecture about, cut off as they are from the restless currents of the world. The many naked little sandbars which lie between Venice and the mainland, in the seemingly stagnant water of the lagoons, are made habitable and wholesome only because, every night, a foot and a half of tide creeps in from the sea and winds its fresh brine up through all that network of shining waterways. So, into all the little settlements of quiet people, tidings of what their boys and girls are doing in the world bring real refreshment; bring to the old, memories, and to the young, dreams.
Miracles. . . seem to me to rest not so much upon. . . healing power coming suddenly near us from afar but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that, for a moment, our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there around us always.
While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.
Miracles surround us at every turn, if we but sharpen our perceptions to them.
A crimson fire that vanquishes the stars;A pungent odor from the dusty sage;A sudden stirring of the huddled herds;A breaking of the distant table-landsThrough purple mists ascending, and the flareOf water ditches silver in the light;A swift, bright lance hurled low across the world;A sudden sickness for the hills of home.
Beautiful surroundings, the society of learned men, the charm of noble women, the graces of art, could not make up for the loss of those light-hearted mornings of the desert, for that wind that made one a boy again. He had noticed that this peculiar quality in the air of new countries vanished after they were tamed by man and made to bear harvests. Parts of Texas and Kansas that he had first known as open range had since been made into rich farming districts, and the air had quite lost that lightness, that dry, aromatic odour. The moisture of plowed land, the heaviness of labour and growth and grain-bearing, utterly destroyed it; one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world, on the great grass plains or the sage-brush desert.
I slept that night in the room I used to have when I was a little boy, with the summer wind blowing in at the windows, bringing the smell of the ripe fields. I lay awake and watched the moonlight shining over the barn and the stacks and the pond, and the windmill making its old dark shadow against the blue sky.
They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.
I believe that Gaston Cleric narrowly missed being a great poet, and I have sometimes thought that his outbursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication. How often have I seen him draw his dark brows together, fix his eyes upon some object on the wall or a figure in the carpet, and then flash into the lamplight the very image that was in his brain.
Bouchalka was not a reflective person. He had his own idea of what a great prima donna should be like, and he took it for granted that Mme. Garnet corresponded to his conception. The curious thing was that he managed to impress his idea upon Cressida herself. She began to see herself as he saw her, to try to be like the notion of her that he carried everywhere in that pointed head of his. She was exalted quite beyond herself. Things that had been chilled under the grind came to life in her that winter, with the breath of Bouchalka’s adoration. Then, if ever in her life, she heard the bird sing on the branch outside her window; and she wished she were younger, lovelier, freer. She wished there were no Poppas, no Horace, no Garnets. She longed to be only the bewitching creature Bouchalka imagined her.
Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter song, as if it said" "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. " It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer.
Most beautiful of all was the tarnished gold of the elms, with a little brown in it, a little bronze, a little blue, even-- a blue like amethyst, which made them melt into the azure haze with a kind of happiness, a harmony of mood that filled the air with content.
Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.
No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
There are some things you learn best in calm and some in storm.
I am enjoying to a full that period of reflection which is the happiest conclusion to a life of action.
There is only one big thing-desire. And before it when it is big all is little.
I tell you there is no such thing as creative hate!,Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.
The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
That is happiness: to be dissolved into something completely great.
Where there is great love there are always wishes.
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
No one can builu her security upon the nobleness of another person.
Art it seems to me should simplify.
In this world people have to pay an extortionate price for any exceptional gift whatever.
Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.
Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.
I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.
That is happiness to be dissolved into something complete and great.
Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.
Where there is great love, there are always wishes.
There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
