The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades…

The world is always full of brilliant youth which fades into grey and embittered middle age: the first flowering takes everything. The great men are those who have developed slowly, or who have been able to survive the glamour of their early florescence and to go on learning from life.

Sourced, Not Under Forty (1936)

“Joseph and His Brothers” ~ First published in The Saturday Review of Literature (6 June 1936)

Other Willa Cather Quotes

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We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it — for a little while. - View Quote Details on We come and go, but the land is always here…
When we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord. - View Quote Details on When we look back, the only things we cherish are…
She used to drag her mattress beside her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with excitement, as a machine vibrates from speed. Life rushed in upon her through that window— or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without. There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that it was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation. - View Quote Details on She used to drag her mattress beside her low window…
“In great misfortunes,” he told himself, “people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love — if once one has ever fallen in.”
Falling out, for him, seemed to mean falling out of all domestic and social relations, out of his place in the human family, indeed. - View Quote Details on “In great misfortunes,” he told himself, “people want to be…
The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, — and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky! - View Quote Details on The sky was as full of motion and change as…
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…
In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again. - View Quote Details on In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with…
Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere. Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him… We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder. - View Quote Details on Freedom so often means that one isn’t needed anywhere. Here…