It does not matter much whom we live with in…

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

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Youth and the Bright Medusa, “A Gold Slipper” (1920)

Other Willa Cather Quotes

To people off alone, as we were, there is something stirring about finding evidences of human labour and care in the soil of an empty country. It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel differently about the ground you walk over every day. - View Quote Details on To people off alone, as we were, there is something…
She remembered home as a place where there were always too many children, a cross man and work piling up around a sick woman. - View Quote Details on She remembered home as a place where there were always…
Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family — but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything. - View Quote Details on Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others…
Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers. - View Quote Details on Religion and art spring from the same root and are…
Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole — so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader’s consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page. - View Quote Details on Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is…
Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand — a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods — or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values. - View Quote Details on Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for…
Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement. - View Quote Details on Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process…
Now everything was in ruins. The air was still and cold like the air in a refrigerating-room. What I felt was fear; I was afraid to look or speak or move. Everything about me seemed evil. When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them, as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless. - View Quote Details on Now everything was in ruins. The air was still and…
Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past. - View Quote Details on Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the…
Perhaps I am like Carrie Jensen, the sister of one of my hired men. She had never been out of the cornfields, and a few years ago she got despondent and said life was just the same thing over and over, and she didn’t see the use of it. After she had tried to kill herself once or twice, her folks got worried and sent her over to Iowa to visit some relations. Ever since she’s come back she’s been perfectly cheerful, and she says she’s contented to live and work in a world that’s so big and interesting. She said that anything as big as the bridges over the Platte and the Missouri reconciled her. And it’s what goes on in the world that reconciles me. - View Quote Details on Perhaps I am like Carrie Jensen, the sister of one…