# Willa Cather - Quotes: 84 - Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather ## Books - [Death Comes for the Archbishop](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/death-comes-for-the-archbishop.md) — 6 quotes - [My Antonia](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/my-antonia.md) — 18 quotes - [My Mortal Enemy](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/my-mortal-enemy.md) — 6 quotes - [Not Under Forty](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/not-under-forty.md) — 8 quotes - [O Pioneers!](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/o-pioneers.md) — 12 quotes - [The Professor's House](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/the-professors-house.md) — 9 quotes - [The Song Of The Lark](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/the-song-of-the-lark.md) — 10 quotes - [Willa Cather In Europe](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/willa-cather-in-europe.md) — 7 quotes - [Willa Cather On Writing](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/willa-cather-on-writing.md) — 8 quotes ## Recently added quotes > Every artist knows that there is no such thing as "freedom" in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is to lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures or objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/willa-cather-on-writing/every-artist-knows.md) > Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole — so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/willa-cather-on-writing/art-it-seems.md) > 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. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/willa-cather-in-europe/every-american-travelling.md) > We were at last in Monte Cristo's country, fairly into the country of the fabulous, where extravagance ceases to exist because everything is extravagant, and where the wildest dreams come true. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/willa-cather-in-europe/we-were-at-last.md) > The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/willa-cather-on-writing/the-condition-every.md) > I am sure I do not know why the beauty of Monte Carlo should not satisfy more than it does. The bluest of all seas is nowhere bluer than when you see it between the marble balustrades of the long white terrace before the casino, palms are nowhere greener than in that high garden which the mountain screen from every unkind breath, no colours could be more rich and various than those of the red and purple Alps that tower up behind the town, on whose summit such violent thunderstorms gather and break. But for me, at least, there was not at all the pleasure I had anticipated in this dazzling white and blue, these feathery palms and ragged Alps. ...I had a continual restless feeling that there was nothing at all real about Monte Carlo; that the sea was too blue to be wet, the casino too white to be anything but pasteboard, and that from their very greenness the palms must be cotton. … in atmosphere and spirit the entire kingdom of Monaco is an extension of the casino. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/willa-cather-in-europe/i-am-sure.md) > Nearly all the Escapists in the long past have managed their own budget and their social relations so unsuccessfully that I wouldn't want them for my landlords, or my bankers, or my neighbors. They were valuable, like powerful stimulants, only when they were left out of the social and industrial routine. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/willa-cather-on-writing/nearly-all-the.md) > 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. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/willa-cather-on-writing/art-is-a-concrete.md) > From the time the Englishman's bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas. (16 September 1902) [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/willa-cather-in-europe/from-the-time.md) > 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. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/willa-cather-in-europe/if-the-street.md) > Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/willa-cather-on-writing/religion-and-art.md) > What a thing it is to lie there all day in the fine breeze, with the pine needles dropping on one, only to return to the hotel at night so hungry that the dinner, however homely, is a fete, and the menu finer reading than the best poetry in the world! Yet we are to leave all this for the glare and blaze of Nice and Monte Carlo; which is proof enough that one cannot become really acclimated to happiness. (10 September 1902) in the village of Cavalaire, France. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/willa-cather/willa-cather-in-europe/what-a-thing.md)