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No One Can Build His Security Upon The Nobleness Of Another Person. Two People, When They Love Each Other, Grow Alike In Their Tastes And Habits And Pride, But Their Moral Natures (whatever We May Mean By That Canting Expression) Are Never Welded. The Base One Goes On Being Base, And The Noble One Noble, To The End.

-Willa Cather

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No One Can Build

Willa Cather

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No One Can Build His Security Upon The Nobleness Of Another Person. Two People, When They Love Each Other, Grow Alike In Their Tastes And Habits And Pride, But Their Moral Natures (whatever We May Mean By That Canting Expression) Are Never Welded. The Base One Goes On Being Base, And The Noble One Noble, To The End.

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The Sky Was A Midnight-blue, Like Warm, Deep, Blue Water, And The Moon Seemed To Lie On It Like A Water-lily, Floating Forward With An Invisible Current.

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Oh, That's The Beauty Of The Rose, That It Blossoms And Dies.

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

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

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

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What If - What If Life Itself Were The Sweetheart?

If The Street Life, Not The Whitechapel Street Life, But That Of The Common But So-called Respectable Part Of Town Is In Any City More Gloomy, More Ugly, More Grimy, More Cruel Than In London, I Certainly Don't Care To See It. Sometimes It Occurs To One That Possibly All The Failures Of This Generation, The World Over, Have Been Suddenly Swept Into London, For The Streets Are A Restless, Breathing, Malodorous Pageant Of The Seedy Of All Nations.

This Generation

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.

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

The Higher Processes Are All Processes Of Simplification. The Novelist Must Learn To Write, And Then He Must Unlearn It; Just As The Modern Painter Learns To Draw, And Then Learns When Utterly To Disregard His Accomplishment, When To Subordinate It To A Higher And Truer Effect.

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.

There Seemed To Be Nothing To See; No Fences, No Creeks Or Trees, No Hills Or Fields. If There Was A Road, I Could Not Make It Out In The Faint Starlight. There Was Nothing But Land: Not A Country At All, But The Material Out Of Which Countries Are Made.

There Is A Popular Superstition That "realism" Asserts Itself In The Cataloguing Of A Great Number Of Material Objects, In Explaining Mechanical Processes, The Methods Of Operating Manufactories And Trades, And In Minutely And Unsparingly Describing Physical Sensations. But Is Not Realism, More Than It Is Anything Else, An Attitude Of Mind On The Part Of The Writer Toward His Material, A Vague Indication Of The Sympathy And Candour With Which He Accepts, Rather Than Chooses, His Theme?

There Are Only Two Or Three Human Stories, And They Go On Repeating Themselves As Fiercely As If They Had Never Happened Before.

If There Were No Girls Like Them In The World, There Would Be No Poetry

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

Pity Is Sworn Servant Unto Love: And This Be Sure, Wherever It Begin To Make The Way, It Lets Your Master In.

A Work-room Should Be Like An Old Shoe; No Matter How Shabby, It's Better Than A New One.

Youth, When It Is Hurt, Likes To Feel Itself Betrayed.

Yet The Summer Which Was To Change Everything Was Coming Nearer Every Day. When Boys And Girls Are Growing Up, Life Can't Stand Still, Not Even In The Quietest Of Country Towns; And They Have To Grow Up, Whether They Will Or No. That Is What Their Elders Are Always Forgetting.

The Idea Of You Is A Part Of My Mind; You Influence My Likes And Dislikes, All My Tastes, Hundreds Of Times When I Don't Realize It. You Really Are A Part Of Me. 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 Again.

The Air Was Cool Enough To Make The Warm Sun Pleasant On One's Back And Shoulders, And So Clear That The Eye Could Follow A Hawk Up And Up, Into The Blazing Blue Depths Of The Sky.

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He Domesticated And Developed The Native Wild Flowers. He Had One Hill-side Solidly Clad With That Low-growing Purple Verbena Which Mats Over The Hills Of New Mexico. It Was Like A Great Violet Velvet Mantle Thrown Down In The Sun; All The Shades That The Dyers And Weavers Of Italy And France Strove For Through Centuries, The Violet That Is Full Of Rose Colour And Is Yet Not Lavender; The Blue That Becomes Almost Pink And Then Retreats Again Into Sea-dark Purple—the True Episcopal Colour And Countless Variations Of It.

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Whatever Is Felt Upon The Page Without Being Specifically Named There - That, One Might Say, Is Created. It Is The Inexplicable Presence Of The Thing Not Named, Of The Overtone Divined By The Ear But Not Heard By It, The Verbal Mood, The Emotional Aura Of The Fact Or The Thing Or The Deed, That Gives High Quality To The Novel Or The Drama, As Well As To Poetry Itself.

Give The People A New Word And They Think They Have A New Fact.

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.

Every Individual Taste, Every Natural Appetite, Was Bridled By Caution. The People Asleep In Those Houses, I Thought, Tried To Live Like The Mice In Their Own Kitchens; To Make No Noise, To Leave No Trace, To Slip Over The Surface Of Things In The Dark.

Prayers Said By Good People Are Always Good Prayers

Alcohol Is Perfectly Consistent In Its Effects Upon Man. Drunkenness Is Merely An Exaggeration. A Foolish Man Drunk Becomes Maudlin; A Bloody Man, Vicious; A Coarse Man, Vulgar.

Exaggeration Is

The Condition Every Art Requires Is, Not So Much Freedom From Restriction, As Freedom From Adulteration And From The Intrusion Of Foreign Matter.

I Had Killed A Big Snake. I Was Now A Big Fellow.

We All Like People Who Do Things, Even If We Only See Their Faces On Cigar-box Lids.

Late One Brilliant April Afternoon Professor Lucius Wilson Stood At The Head Of Chestnut Street, Looking About Him With The Pleased Air Of A Man Of Taste Who Does Not Very Often Get To Boston.

Elsewhere The Sky Is The Roof Of The World; But Here The Earth Was The Floor Of The Sky.

The Soul Cannot Be Humbled By Fasts And Prayer; It Must Be Broken By Mortal Sin To Experience Forgiveness Of Sin And Rise To A State Of Grace. Otherwise, Religion Is Nothing But Dead Logic.

It Is Easy To Pity When Once One's Vanity Has Been Tickled.

There Is Often A Good Deal Of The Child Left In People Who Have Had To Grow Up Too Soon.

It Is Scarcely Exaggeration To Say That If One Is Not A Little Mad About Balzac At Twenty, One Will Never Live; And If At Forty One Can Still Take Rastignac And Lucien De Rubempre At Balzac's Own Estimate, One Has Lived In Vain.

One Summer Evening In The Year 1848, Three Cardinals And A Missionary Were Dining Together In The Gardens Of A Villa In The Sabine Hills, Overlooking Rome.

A Soup Like This Is Not The Work Of One Man. It Is The Result Of A Constantly Refined Tradition. There Are Nearly A Thousand Years Of History In This Soup.

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.

Some People's Lives Are Affected By What Happens To Their Person Or Their Property; But For Others Fate Is What Happens To Their Feelings And Their Thoughts -- That And Nothing More.

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Bernadette Devlin

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