Willa Cather

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.

I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.

All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.

That is happiness to be dissolved into something complete and great.

It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.

The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Where there is great love, there are always wishes.

The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.

Only solitary men know the full joys of frienship. Others have their family but to a solitary and an exile, his friends are everything.

I shall not die of a cold. I shall die of having lived.

There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.