Willa Cather
Willa Cather
Willa Sibert Catherwas an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, including O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, a novel set during World War I...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 December 1873
CountryUnited States of America
unique voice mind
Every fine story must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure, a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer's own, individual, unique.
sports voice world
All the intelligence and talent in the world can't make a singer. The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity. It is a sport, like the silver fox. It happens.
eye healing voice
The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.
voice captivity wild-things
The voice is a wild thing. It can't be bred in captivity.
country fiercely five happened human notes repeating singing themselves thousands three
Isn't it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years
earth elsewhere floor roof sky
Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world, but here the earth is the floor of the sky.
anxious detail fight hard landscape rare scarcity trees visit
Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons. It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.
die entirely felt goodness lay perhaps sun whether
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.
love men
Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they're in love with somebody.
came forward heard holding professor
She heard him give his name, and came forward holding out her hand. "Is it you, indeed, Professor Wilson?
case expect knows people
No one person knows much more about writing than another. I expect that when people think they know anything about it, then their case is hopeless.
build security
No one can build her security on the nobleness of another person
faces people
We all like people who do things, even if we only see their faces on a cigar-box lid.
entirely human intimate irregular quality
That irregular and intimate quality of things made entirely by the human hand.