Willa Cather
That is happiness: to be dissolved into something complete and great.
Willa CatherThe 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.
Willa CatherOnly solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.
Willa CatherI like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
Willa CatherWhere there is great love, there are always miracles.
Willa CatherMen travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.
Willa CatherThere are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.
Willa CatherAll 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.
Willa CatherThe fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor.
Willa CatherThe condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
Willa CatherA work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it's better than a new one.
Willa CatherSometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.
Willa CatherWinter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.
Willa CatherNo one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.
Willa CatherTrees 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.
Willa CatherThe sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world.
Willa CatherThe stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
Willa CatherEvery artist makes himself born. It is very much harder than the other time, and longer.
Willa CatherThe dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.
Willa CatherThe thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.
Willa CatherThe history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.
Willa CatherThe heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.
Willa CatherPOPPIES ON LUDLOW CASTLE
THROUGH halls of vanished pleasure,
And hold of vanished power,
And crypt of faith forgotten,
A came to Ludlow tower.
A-top of arch and stairway,
Of crypt and donjan cell,
Of council hall, and chamber,
Of wall, and ditch, and well,
High over grated turrets
Where clinging ivies run,
A thousand scarlet poppies
Enticed the rising sun,
Upon the topmost turret,
With death and damp below,--
Three hundred years of spoilage,--
The crimson poppies grow.
This hall it was that bred him,
These hills that knew him brave,
The gentlest English singer
That fills an English grave.
How have they heart to blossom
So cruel and gay and red,
When beauty so hath perished
And valour so hath sped?
When knights so fair are rotten,
And captains true asleep,
And singing lips are dust-stopped
Six English earth-feet deep?
When ages old remind me
How much hath gone for naught,
What wretched ghost remaineth
Of all that flesh hath wrought;
Of love and song and warring,
Of adventure and play,
Of art and comely building,
Of faith and form and fray--
I'll mind the flowers of pleasure,
Of short-lived youth and sleep,
That drunk the sunny weather
A-top of Ludlow keep.
PARADOX
I KNEW them both upon Miranda's isle,
Which is of youth a sea-bound seigniory:
Misshapen Caliban, so seeming vile,
And Ariel, proud prince of minstrelsy,
Who did forsake the sunset for my tower
And like a star above my slumber burned.
The night was held in silver chains by power
Of melody, in which all longings yearned--
Star-grasping youth in one wild strain expressed,
Tender as dawn, insistent as the tide;
The heart of night and summer stood confessed.
I rose aglow and flung the lattice wide--
Ah, jest of art, what mockery and pang!
Alack, it was poor Caliban who sang.
She used to drag her mattress besider 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 is 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.
Willa Cather