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Look At My Papa Here; He's Been Dead All These Years, And Yet He Is More Real To Me Than Almost Anybody Else. He Never Goes Out Of My Life. I Talk To Him And Consult Him All The Time. The Older I Grow, The Better I Know Him And The More I Understand Him.

-Willa Cather

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Look At My Papa

Willa Cather

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Look At My Papa Here; He's Been Dead All These Years, And Yet He Is More Real To Me Than Almost Anybody Else. He Never Goes Out Of My Life. I Talk To Him And Consult Him All The Time. The Older I Grow, The Better I Know Him And The More I Understand Him.

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The Great Fact In Life, The Always Possible Escape From Dullness, Was The Lake. The Sun Rose Out Of It, The Day Began There; It Was Like An Open Door That Nobody Could Shut. The Land And All Its Dreariness Could Never Close In On You. You Had Only To Look At The Lake, And You Knew You Would Soon Be Free.

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Personal Hatred And Family Affection Are Not Incompatible; They Often Flourish And Grow Strong Together.

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In This World People Have To Pay An Extortionate Price For Any Exceptional Gift Whatever.

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Exaggeration Is

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Freedom So Often Means That One Isn't Needed Anywhere.

To Note An Artist's Limitations Is But To Define His Talent. A Reporter Can Write Equally Well About Everything That Is Presented To His View, But A Creative Writer Can Do His Best Only With What Lies Within The Range And Character Of His Deepest Sympathies.

If You Love The Good Thing Vitally, Enough To Give Up For It All That One Must Give Up, Then You Must Hate The Cheap Thing Just As Hard. I Tell You, There Is Such A Thing As Creative Hate! “a Contempt That Drives You Through Fire, Makes You Risk Everything And Lose Everything, Makes You A Long Sight Better Than You Ever Knew You Could Be.

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The History Of Every Country Begins In The Heart Of A Man Or A Woman.

Some Things Are Best Learned In Calm, Others In Storm.

If We Never Arrived Anywhere, It Did Not Matter. Between That Earth And That Sky I Felt Erased, Blotted Out. I Did Not Say My Prayers That Night: Here, I Felt What Would Be Would Be.

I Have Not Much Faith In Women In Fiction.... Women Are So Horribly Subjective And They Have Such Scorn For The Healthy Commonplace. When A Woman Writes A Story Of Adventure, A Stout Sea Tale, A Manly Battle Yarn, Anything Without Wine, Women, And Love, Then I Will Begin To Hope For Something Great From Them, Not Before.

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A Child's Attitude Toward Everything Is An Artist's Attitude.

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This Generation

The Heart, When It Is Too Much Alive, Aches For That Brown Earth, And Ecstasy Has No Fear Of Death.

Miracles Surround Us At Every Turn If We But Sharpen Our Perceptions Of Them.

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Let Your Fiction Grow Out Of The Land Beneath Your Feet.

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The End Is Nothing; The Road Is All.

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Hunger Is A Powerful Incentive To Introspection.

I Shall Not Die Of A Cold. I Shall Die Of Having Lived.

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Falling In Love

The Irregular And Intimate Quality Of Things Made Entirely By The Human Hand.

What If - What If Life Itself Were The Sweetheart?

Where There Is Great Love There Are Always Miracles.

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There Are Some Things You Learn Best In Calm, And Some In Storm.

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.

It Has Long Been A Tradition Among Novel Writers That A Book Must End By Everybody Getting Just What They Wanted, Or If The Conventional Happy Ending Was Impossible, Then It Must Be A Tragedy In Which One Or Both Should Die. In Real Life Very Few Of Us Get What We Want, Our Tragedies Don't Kill Us, But We Go On Living Them Year After Year, Carrying Them With Us Like A Scar On An Old Wound.

This Is Reality, Whether You Like It Or Not--all Those Frivolities Of Summer, The Light And Shadow, The Living Mask Of Green That Trembled Over Everything, They Were Lies, And This Is What Was Underneath. This Is The Truth.

An Artist's Saddest Secrets Are Those That Have To Do With His Artistry.

Love Itself Draws On A Woman Nearly All The Bad Luck In The World

Oh, This Is The Joy Of The Rose; That It Blows, And Goes.

The Land Belongs To The Future.

Every Artist Makes Herself Born. You Must Bring The Artist Into The World Yourself.

Every American Travelling In England Gets His Own Individual Sport Out Of The Toy Passenger And Freight Trains And The Tiny Locomotives, With Their Faint, Indignant, Tiny Whistle. Especially In Western England One Wonders How The Business Of A Nation Can Possibly Be Carried On By Means So Insufficient.

I First Met Myra Henshawe When I Was Fifteen, But I Had Known Her About Ever Since I Could Remember Anything At All.

One Realizes That Human Relationships Are The Tragic Necessity Of Human Life; That They Can Never Be Wholly Satisfactory, That Every Ego Is Half The Time Greedily Seeking Them, And Half The Time Pulling Away From Them. In Those Simple Relationships Of Loving Husband And Wife, Affectionate Sisters, Children And Grandmother, There Are Innumerable Shades Of Sweetness And Anguish Which Make Up The Pattern Of Our Lives Day By Day, Though They Are Not Down In The List Of Subjects From Which The Conventional Novelist Works.

There Was Only - Spring Itself, The Throb Of It, The Light Restlessness, The Vital Essence Of It Everywhere; In The Sky, In The Swift Clouds, In The Pale Sunshine, And In The Warm High Wind - Rising Suddenly, Sinking Suddenly, Impulsive ... If I Had Been Tossed Down Blindfold On That Red Prairie, I Should Have Known That It Was Spring.

From Two Ears That Had Grown Side By Side, The Grains Of One Shot Up Joyfully Into The Light, Projecting Themselves Into The Future, And The Grains From The Other Lay Still In The Earth And Rotted; And Nobody Knew Why.

I Was Thinking, As I Watched Her, How Little It Mattered –about Her Teeth For Instance. I Know So Many Women Who Have Kept All The Things She Had Lost, *but Whose Inner Glow Has Faded*. Whatever Else Was Gone, Antonia Had Not Lost The Fire Of Life.

Nothing Mattered ... But Writing Books, And Living The Kind Of Life That Made It Possible To Write Them.

One May Have Staunch Friends In One's Own Family, But One Seldom Has Admirers.

Life Began For Me, When I Ceased To Admire And Began To Remember.

One Afternoon Late In October Of The Year 1697, Euclide Auclair, The Philosopher Apothecary Of Quebec, Stood On The Top Of Cap Diamant Gazing Down The Broad, Empty River Far Beneath Him.

A Watch Is The Most Essential Part Of A Lecture.

Too Much Information Is Rather Deadening.

Too Much Information

How Terrible It Was To Love People When You Could Not Really Share Their Lives!

I Don't Want Anyone Reading My Writing To Think About Style. I Just Want Them To Be In The Story.

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 The Eyes Of The Flesh Are Shut, The Eyes Of The Spirit Are Open.

There Was Nothing But Land; Not A Country At All, But The Material Out Of Which Countries Are Made.

[dawn] Is Always Such A Forgiving Time. When That First Cold, Bright Streak Comes Over The Water, It's As If All Our Sins Were Pardoned; As If The Sky Leaned Over The Earth And Kissed It And Gave It Absolution.

The More Observing Ones May Have Seen, But Discerning People Are Usually Discreet And Often Kind, For We Usually Bleed A Little Before We Begin To Discern.

The Prayers Of All Good People Are Good.

Too Much Detail Is Apt, Like Any Other Form Of Extravagance, To Become Slightly Vulgar.

Imagination, Which Is A Quality Writers Must Have, Does Not Mean The Ability To Weave Pretty Stories Out Of Nothing. In The Right Sense, Imagination Is A Response To What Is Going On — A Sensitiveness To Which Outside Things Appeal. It Is A Composition Of Sympathy And Observation.

In Other Searchings It Might Be The Object Of The Quest That Brought Satisfaction, Or It Might Be Something Incidental That One Got On The Way; But In Religion, Desire Was Fulfilment, It Was The Seeking Itself That Rewarded.

A Creative Writer Can Do His Best Only With What Lies Within The Range And Character Of His Deepest Sympathies.

Art Is A Concrete And Personal And Rather Childish Thing After All - No Matter What People Do To Graft It Into Science And Make It Sociological And Psychological; It Is No Good At All Unless It Is Let Alone To Be Itself - A Game Of Make-believe, Or Re-production, Very Exciting And Delightful To People Who Have An Ear For It Or An Eye For It.

It Is A Tragic Hour, That Hour When We Are Finally Driven To Reckon With Ourselves, When Every Avenue Of Mental Distraction Has Been Cut Off And Our Own Life And All Its Ineffaceable Failures Closes About Us Like The Walls Of That Old Torture Chamber Of The Inquisition.

Sometimes A Neighbor Whom We Have Disliked A Lifetime For His Arrogance And Conceit Lets Fall A Single Commonplace Remark That Shows Us Another Side, Another Man, Really; A Man Uncertain, And Puzzled, And In The Dark Like Ourselves.

The Stupid Believe That To Be Truthful Is Easy; Only The Artist, The Great Artist, Knows How Difficult It Is.

People Have To Snatch At Happiness When They Can, In This World. It Is Always Easier To Lose Than To Find.

Wherever Humanity Has Made That Hardest Of All Starts And Lifted Itself Out Of Mere Brutality Is A Sacred Spot.

Art, It Seems To Me, Should Simplify.

Desire Is Creation, Is The Magical Element In That Process. If There Were An Instrument By Which To Measure Desire, One Could Foretell Achievement.

Men Are All Right For Friends, But As Soon As You Marry Them They Turn Into Cranky Old Fathers, Even The Wild Ones.

No Nation Has Ever Produced Great Art That Has Not Made A High Art Of Cookery, Because Art Appeals Primarily To The Senses.

I Kept As Still As I Could. Nothing Happened. I Did Not Expect Anything To Happen. I Was Something That Lay Under The Sun And Felt It, Like The Pumpkins, And I Did Not Want To Be Anything More. I Was Entirely Happy. Perhaps We Feel Like That When We Die And Become A Part Of Something Entire, Whether It Is Sun And Air, Or Goodness And Knowledge. At Any Rate, That Is Happiness; To Be Dissolved Into Something Complete And Great. When It Comes To One, It Comes As Naturally As Sleep.

Setting ... Is Accident. Either A Building Is Part Of A Place, Or It Is Not. Once That Kinship Is There, Time Will Only Make It Stronger.

That Is Happiness; To Be Dissolved Into Something Complete And Great.

The Trees And Shrubbery Seemed Well-groomed And Social, Like Pleasant People.

Beautiful Women, Whose Beauty Meant More Than It Said... Was Their Brilliancy Always Fed By Something Coarse And Concealed? Was That Their Secret?

I Wanted To Walk Straight On Through The Red Grass And Over The Edge Of The World, Which Could Not Be Very Far Away. The Light And Air Abot Me Told Me That The World Ended Here: Only The Ground And Sun And Sky Were Left, And If One Went A Little Farther There Would Only Be Sun And Sky, And One Would Float Off Into Them, Like The Tawny Hawks Which Sailed Over Our Heads Making Slow Shadows On The Grass.

Most Publishers, Like Most Writers, Are Ruined By Their Successes.

The Voice Is A Wild Thing. It Can't Be Bred In Captivity.

Paris Is A Hard Place To Leave, Even When It Rains Incessantly And One Coughs Continually From The Dampness.

No One Can Build His Security Upon The Nobleness Of Another Person.

Oh, The Germans Classify, But The French Arrange.

The Emptiness Was Intense, Like The Stillness In A Great Factory When The Machinery Stops Running.

Pittsburgh Was Even More Vital, More Creative, More Hungry For Culture Than New York. Pittsburgh Was The Birthplace Of My Writing.

It Takes A Great Deal Of Experience To Become Natural.

But She Still Had That Something Which Fires The Imagination, Could Still Stop One's Breath For A Moment By A Look Or Gesture That Somehow Revealed The Meaning In Common Things. She Had Only To Stand In The Orchard, To Put Her Hand On A Little Crab Tree And Look Up At The Apples, To Make You Feel The Goodness Of Planting And Tending And Harvesting At Last. All The Strong Things Of Her Heart Came Out In Her Body, That Had Been So Tireless In Serving Generous Emotions. It Was No Wonder That Her Sons Stood Tall And Straight. She Was A Rich Mine Of Life, Like The Founders Of Early Races.

Today I Stood Taller From Walking Among The Trees.

The Pale, Cold Light Of The Winter Sunset Did Not Beautify - It Was Like The Light Of Truth Itself.

Only Solitary Men Know The Full Joys Of Frienship. Others Have Their Family; But To A Solitary And An Exile, His Friends Are Everything.

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Giulio Andreotti

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