“In great misfortunes, 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.”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“And that's what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own individual lives.”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“My dear," he sighed when the lights were turned on and they both looked older, "it's been a mistake, our having a family and writing histories and getting middle-aged. We should have been picturesquely shipwrecked together when we were young.”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“I was thinking", he answered absently, "about Euripides; how, when he was an old man, he went and lived in a cave by the sea, and it was thought queer at the time. It seems that houses had become insupportable to him. I wonder whether it was because he had observed women so closely all his life.”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“Theoretically he knew that life is possible, may even be pleasant, without joy, without passionate griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to live like that.”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“If words had cost money, Tom couldn't have used them more sparingly. The adjectives were purely descriptive, relating to form and colour, and were used to present the objects under consideration, not the young explorer's emotions. Yet through this austerity one felt the kindling imagination, the ardour and excitement of the boy, like the vibration in a voice when the speaker strives to conceal his emotion by using only the conventional phrases.”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“I don't myself think much of science as a phase of human development. It has given us a lot of ingenious toys; they take our attention away from the real problems, of course, and since the problems are insoluble, I suppose we ought to be grateful for distraction. But the fact is, the human mind, the individual mind, has always been made more interesting by dwelling on the old riddles, even if it makes nothing of them. Science hasn't given us any new amazements, except of the superficial kind we get from witnessing dexterity and sleight-of-hand. It hasn't given us any richer pleasures, as the Renaissance did, nor any new sins-not one! Indeed, it takes our old ones away. It's the laboratory, not the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. You'll agree there is not much thrill about a physiological sin. We were better off when even the prosaic matter of taking nourishment could have the magnificence of a sin. I don't think you help people by making their conduct of no importance-you impoverish them. As long as every man and woman who crowded into the cathedrals on Easter Sunday was a principal in a gorgeous drama with God, glittering angels on one side and the shadows of evil coming and going on the other, life was a rich thing. The king and the beggar had the same chance at miracles and great temptations and revelations. And that's what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own little individual lives. It makes us happy to surround our creature needs and bodily instincts with as much pomp and circumstance as possible. Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“The man he was now, the personality his friends knew, had begun to grow strong during adolescence, during the years when he was always consciously or unconsciously conjugating the verb "to love"-- in society and solitude, with people, with books, with the sky and open country, in the lonesomeness of crowded city streets.”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“Yes, it was possible that the little world, on its voyage among all the stars, might become like that; a boat on which one could travel no longer, from which one could no longer look up and confront those bright rings of revolution.”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“There are times when one's vitality is too high to be clouded, too elastic to stay down.”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“didn’t say anything, because there was too much to say. I stood outside the cabin until the gold light went blue and a few stars came out, hardly brighter than the bright sky they twinkled in, and the swallows came flying over us, on their way to their nests in the cliffs. It was the time of day when everything goes home. From habit and from weariness I went in through the door. The kitchen table was spread for supper, I could smell a rabbit stew cooking on the stove. Blake lit the lantern and begged me to eat my supper. I didn’t go into the bunk-room, for I knew the shelves in there were empty. I heard Blake talking to me as you hear people talking when you are asleep.”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“But now that the vivid consciousness of an earlier state had come back to him, the Professor felt that life with this Kansas boy, little as there had been of it, was the realest of his lives, and that all the years between had been accidental and ordered from the outside. His career, his wife, his family, were not his life at all, but a chain of events which had happened to him. All these things had nothing to do with the person he was in the beginning. The”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“a thousand dollars reward for whoever found him. But it came to nothing. Father Duchene and our friends down there are still looking. But the older I grow, the more I understand what it was I did that night on the mesa. Anyone who requites faith and friendship as I did, will have to pay for it. I’m not very sanguine about good fortune for myself. I’ll be called to account when I least expect it. In”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“I can’t altogether tell myself, Lillian. It’s not wholly a matter of the calendar. It’s the feeling that I’ve put a great deal behind me, where I can’t go back to it again—and I don’t really wish to go back. The way would be too long and too fatiguing.”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“man can do anything if he wishes to enough, St. Peter believed. Desire is creation, is the magical element in that process. If there were an instrument by which to measure desire, one could foretell achievement. He”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“Hang it, Outland doesn’t need their generosity! They’ve got everything he ought to have had, and the least they can do is to be quiet about it, and not convert his very bones into a personal asset. It all comes down to this, my dear: one likes the florid style, or one doesn’t. You yourself used not to like it. And will you give me some more coffee, please?” She refilled his cup and handed it across”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“What he had not known was that, at a given time, that first nature could return to a man, unchanged by all the pursuits and passions and experiences of his life; untouched even by the tastes and intellectual activities which have been strong enough to give him distinction among his fellows and to have made for him, as they say, a name in the world. Perhaps this reversion did not often occur, but he knew it had happened to him, and he suspected it had happened to his grandfather. He did not regret his life, but he was indifferent to it. It seemed to him like the life of another person. Along”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“The Professor made no reply to this. Lillian had been fiercely jealous of Tom Outland. As he left the house, he was reflecting that people who are intensely in love when they marry, and who go on being in love, always meet with something which suddenly or gradually makes a difference. Sometimes it is the children, or the grubbiness of being poor, sometimes a second infatuation. In their own case it had been, curiously enough, his pupil, Tom Outland. St.”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“No, Miller, I don’t myself think much of science as a phase of human development. It has given us a lot of ingenious toys; they take our attention away from the real problems, of course, and since the problems are insoluble, I suppose we ought to be grateful for distraction. But the fact is, the human mind, the individual mind, has always been made more interesting by dwelling on the old riddles, even if it makes nothing of them. Science hasn’t given us any new amazements, except of the superficial kind we get from witnessing dexterity and sleight-of-hand. It hasn’t given us any richer pleasures, as the Renaissance did, nor any new sins—not one! Indeed, it takes our old ones away. It’s the laboratory, not the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. You’ll agree there is not much thrill about a physiological sin. We were better off when even the prosaic matter of taking nourishment could have the magnificence of a sin. I don’t think you help people by making their conduct of no importance—you impoverish them. As long as every man and woman who crowded into the cathedrals on Easter Sunday was a principal in a gorgeous drama with God, glittering angels on one side and the shadows of evil coming and going on the other, life was a rich thing. The”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“king and the beggar had the same chance at miracles and great temptations and revelations. And that’s what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own little individual lives. It makes us happy to surround our creature needs and bodily instincts with as much pomp and circumstance as possible. Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“The feeling that he was near the conclusion of his life was an instinctive conviction, such as we have when we waken in the dark and know at once that it is near morning; or when we are walking across the country and suddenly know that we are near the sea. Letters came every week”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“You might tell me next week, Miller, what you think science has done for us, besides making us very comfortable.” As”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“He could remember a time when the loneliness of death had terrified him, when the idea of it was insupportable. He used to feel that if his wife could but lie in the same coffin with him, his body would not be so insensible that the nearness of hers would not give it comfort. But now he thought of eternal solitude with gratefulness; as a release from every obligation, from every form of effort. It was the Truth. One”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“And he was such a polite, mannerly old boy; simple and kind as a child. I used to wonder how anybody so innocent and defenceless had managed to get along at all, to keep alive for nearly seventy years in as hard a world as this. Anybody could take advantage of him. He held no grudge against any of the people who had misused him.”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“regarding in her humankind, as if after a definite absence from the world of men and women. If he had thought of Augusta sooner, he would have got up from the couch sooner. Her image would have at once suggested the proper action. Augusta,”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“wished he knew just how it seemed to her. He had been mistaken, he felt. The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“Theoretically he knew that life is possible, may be even pleasant, without joy, without passionate griefs. But it had never occurred to him that he might have to live like that. Though”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“The park was deserted. The arc-lights were turned off. The leafless trees stood quite motionless in the light of the clear stars.”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
“last I had to write him for money to go home. It was slow in coming, and I began to telegraph. I left Washington at last, wiser than I came. I had no plans, I wanted nothing but to get back to the mesa and live a free life and breathe free air, and never, never again to see hundreds of little black-coated men pouring out of white buildings. Queer, how much more depressing they are than workmen coming out of a factory. I”
― Willa Cather, quote from The Professor's House
Willa Cather
Born place: in Back Creek Valley, Virginia, The United States
Born date December 7, 1873
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“a woman whom the course of years had turned sour and to whom the vows meant poverty of spirit, chastity of humour, and obedience only to some rigorous concept of duty.”
― Donna Leon, quote from The Death of Faith
“Anger is never without a Reason, but seldom with a good One.”
― Benjamin Franklin, quote from Wit and Wisdom from Poor Richard's Almanack
“Dear Mr. Fraser,
I write to inform you that I shall not visit Helwater this quarter; official affairs detain me. […] These affairs concern an inquiry into the explosion of a cannon in Germany, June last. I was summoned before an official Commission of Inquiry, which…
He wrote steadily, pausing now and then to compose a sentence, and found that the exercise did seem to bring his seething thoughts to earth.
He wrote of the commission, Marchmont, Twelvetrees, and Oswald, Edgar and his consortium, Jones, Gormley, the corpse of Tom Pilchard… […]
It is a brutal occupation, he wrote, and God help me, if I am no hero, I am damned good at it. You understand, I think, for I know you are the same.
[…] God help me further, he wrote, more slowly. I am afraid. […] I am afraid of everything. Afraid of what I may have done, unknowing—of what I might do. I am afraid of death, of mutilation, incapacity—but any soldier fears these things, and fights regardless. I have done it, and—
He wished to write firmly, and will do it again. Instead, the words formed beneath his quill as they formed in his mind; he could not help but write them.
I am afraid that I might find myself unable. Not only unable to fight, but to command.”
― Diana Gabaldon, quote from Lord John And The Hand Of Devils
“There is something strikingly different about the quality of photographs of that time. It has nothing to do with age or colour, or the feel of paper. . . . In modern family photographs the camera pretends to circulate like a friend, clicking its shutters at those moments when its subjects have disarranged themselves to present to it those postures which they would like to think of as informal. But in pictures of that time, the camera is still a public and alien eye, faced with which people feel bound either to challenge the intrusion by striking postures of defiant hilarity, or else to compose their faces, and straighten their shoulders, not always formally, but usually with just that hint of stiffness which suggests a public face.”
― Amitav Ghosh, quote from The Shadow Lines
“Every negative is a positive. The bad things that happen to me, I somehow make them good.
That means you can’t do anything to hurt me.”
― 50 Cent, quote from The 50th Law
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