Willa Cather

"Success is never as interesting as the struggle to achieve it."

"The greatest privilege of living is to leave the world slightly better than you found it."

"Death is the only really fat thing we cannot avoid."

"A writer must observe, must absorb, and then must understand what has been absorbed."

"The human heart is a strange vessel; we never fully know its depths."

"To be remembered well is to have lived meaningfully."

"The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor."

"Where there is great love, there are always miracles."

"The irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand."

"Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts."

"One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness a reality."

"The test of one's decency is how much of a shock it is to one's sensibilities when one meets decency in a coarse place."

"There are some things about which I have felt since I was young exactly as I feel now, and these things I shall not change."

"I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift."

"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places."

"If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out."

"A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves."

"The great fact in life, the always possible thing, is to find where you belong."

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

"The personal life deeply lived always expands into universal themes and greater circumstances."

"To note an artist's limitations is but to define his genius."

"That irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand."

"The summer I was fifteen something happened to me that had to be lived with and gotten over before I could go on."

"Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, it seems to me, is created."

"No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous."

"The earth was the only thing that made sense and stayed in one place."

"We are all more or less alone in this world; what is to be done about it?"

"A child's life is like a piece of paper on which every person leaves a mark."

"One cannot copy in the real world what the poets have done in verse."

"Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin."