Willa Cather

"The condition every art requires is not so much freedom as it is a little poverty and a degree of struggle."

"Sometimes the heart of a person is almost too large for the body that contains it."

"To be alive is to be willing to die a little, every day."

"The fact is that I am tired of living in uncertainty."

"There is something in us that wants to live, and something that wants to die."

"One cannot maintain friendships without a certain amount of self-disclosure and vulnerability."

"Artistic growth is a refining of the sense of truthfulness."

"What a strange thing is memory, and hope too."

"That is the first principle of true teaching. You must learn to believe in the pupil."

"If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, you'll be a limited creature."

"The novel is born from the shortcomings of history."

"We are the products of all that has gone before us."

"In deeds not years; in thoughts not breaths."

"The best thing about my life is that I believe in the people I work with."

"Miracles surround us at every turn if we but sharpen our perceptions."

"There is a line you must not cross, and yet you do cross it."

"I have not been unhappy, though I have never been happy, if happiness is what you mean by perpetual success."

"Every man has his own destiny; the only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, without question."

"My mind wanders as it will, and I cannot always account for my ideas."

"The sunlight of honest dealing never grows less bright."

"What greater thing is there for two human souls to feel that they are joined together?"

"One cannot fake one's way through music—or life."

"The penalty of advancing age is not that we lose our teeth, but that we lose our friends."

"We have to believe in free will. We've got no choice."

"To most of us, the real life is the life we do not lead."

"Happiness is the great beautifier."

"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, as Blake said."

"There is always something artificial about great men, and always something genuine about the little people."

"Art and religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy."

"In every concealment there is also a disclosure."