Willa Cather

"There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before."

"Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness."

"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."

"One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance."

"When we first begin to believe anything, the more satisfied is our mind."

"There is often a pit of lonesomeness opening before us, mid pleasures of the greatest kind."

"The facts about any creature are only interesting when we've grown fond of that creature."

"Some things are best discovered by accident."

"The land belongs to whoever understands it and loves it the best."

"One had to pay a price for that knowledge; one had to grow old."

"That is what makes life: a thread of violence, and all the rest silence."

"The test of all knowledge is experiment."

"The person who never questioned anything is no more advanced than a stone."

"Perfect happiness, I think, must include a strain of sadness."

"Loyal friends laugh at us; enemies flatter us."

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

"Nothing that happens in any village is unimportant to the world."

"I have sometimes thought that the most delightful time in life is when one has come to understand what is worth living for."

"The condition every art requires is, not to mind hard work."

"Our parents and our memories are all we have."

"The talent one has is for living, not for writing or painting."

"Wonder and doubt are the saddles of the wise."

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

"The only thing worth while about any person is their soul."

"We come and go, but the land is always here."

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

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

"Greatness is not accompanied by change; rather greatness is the ability to handle change."

"Every individual has a lighted window in his breast; no two lights are exactly alike."

"The world is never the same once you've seen it truly."