Willa Cather

author. former critic. UNL alumna. Edith 1903 💞. #NYCliving

[Willa Cather @RealWillaCather]

These three friendly faces gave me courage, and I am sure they always will.

[Willa Cather @RealWillaCather]

To me the fine thing about Mrs. Brodstone was the way she could make flowers grow and gardens grow, and the way she could cook gorgeous food and do things with her hands, and the hearty way in which she accepted life.

[Willa Cather @RealWillaCather]

I remember that sometimes a bright twinkle in Mr. Gere's fine eyes used to make me feel a little distrustful of my rhetorical magnificence.

[Willa Cather @RealWillaCather]

I have never spent an hour in his company without feeling the happier for it, and these meetings, sometimes years apart, have left such vivid pictures in my memory that I often turn to them.

[Willa Cather @RealWillaCather]

J. Walker, black label, is $5.50 a bottle here! So we got some Black & White for $4.00. Very inferior.

[Willa Cather @RealWillaCather]

I always find her interesting, and I have great respect for her intelligence which is of no common order. I even resent the patronizing tone some of her students seem to take toward her.

[Willa Cather @RealWillaCather]

She spoke for more than an hour, and I think I never heard such a good address by either a man or woman. It must be a great joy to be able to do such good work for one's country. She is not more than thirty, and is a very beautiful as well as a very intelligent woman.

[Willa Cather @RealWillaCather]

By the way I must tell you about that aunt of mine some time, she is one of the ugliest, smartest, and most eccentric of human kind,—they say I am like her in ugliness and eccentricity.

[Willa Cather @RealWillaCather]

But, in spite of the very good work that the students did, they were very far from actors of this surpassing type, and could not quite reach us through the unfamiliar medium of the dead languages.

[Willa Cather @RealWillaCather]

I am registered here as Winifred Carter. Horrid name, but all feminine names beginning with W are horrid.

[Willa Cather @RealWillaCather]

And novelists do turn out poets with such ease—overnight, so to speak, while it seems to take God a century or two.

[Willa Cather @RealWillaCather]

Please tell him I have not changed my mind—except about him! I think he’s a bully.

[Willa Cather @RealWillaCather]

She simply surmounts everything that has been wrecked about her and stands large and calm;- she who has lost everything seems still to possess everything, and the small pleasures can still make her rather cold eyes glow with marvelous pleasure.

[Willa Cather @RealWillaCather]

Why, your laws are so rigid in Nebraska that a Nebraska farm boy can't stage a wrestling match in his barn unless he gives the state a minute description of himself and pays five dollars.

[Willa Cather @RealWillaCather]

If the English teacher is vain and opinionated, [...] he will prejudice his better students against the subject he teaches, and will immensely reinforce the self-satisfaction of the shallow and conceited ones.

[Willa Cather @RealWillaCather]

In my heart I shall always remember how much your household added to the happiness of ours.

[Willa Cather @RealWillaCather]

the New England school of cookery is certainly the worst on God’s earth!

[Willa Cather @RealWillaCather]

That woman is so silly, that it is much more entertaining to read her than to read writers who try to be wise.

[Willa Cather @RealWillaCather]

I know more about the real west than you do, but I could never make anybody believe it, because I wear skirts.