Willa Cather Quotes

Because who would ever want to get close to another person if they knew how hard the letting-go part was? In your heart they only die a little at a time, don't they? Like a plant when you go away on a trip and forget to ask a neighbor to poke in once in awhile with the old watering-can, and its so sad—

I'm always fearful of something happening to people I love. That doesn't go away.

It is a blessing as well as a burden to love so much that you can hurt so badly when love is gone.

They’d already taken her from me once. I didn’t want to lose her again.

I don't want to lose you.' His voice almost a whisper. Seeing his haggard expression, she took his hand and squeezed it, then reluctantly let it go. She could feel the tears again, and she fought them back. 'But you don't want to keep me, either, do you?' To that, he had no response.

I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can't stop them. They leave me and I love them more.

I'm not afraid of the world. I'm afraid of a world without you.

D'ye think I don't know?" he asked softly. "It's me that has the easy part now. For if ye feel for me as I do for you-then I'm asking you to tear out your heart and live without it.

Your skin upon my skin, in the beating of our hearts, may the living let us in, before the dead tear us apart.

McKenna will always be a part of me, no matter where he goes. They say that people who've lost a limb sometimes feel as if they still have it. How many times I've felt that McKenna was still here, and the empty space beside me was alive with his presence." She closed her eyes and leaned forward until her forehead and the tip of her nose touched the cool glass. "I love him beyond reason," she whispered. "He's a stranger to me now, and yet he is still so familiar. I can't imagine a sweeter agony, having him so close.

I don't hate you, I love you, you're part of myself, you're my heart and when you go it's my heart torn out and carried away--

Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling.

There is no use in loving things if you have to be torn from them, is there? And it's so hard to keep from loving things, isn't it?

I don't know what will happen to me without you. Only you. Only you love me. Out of everyone in the world.

Betty inhales sharply, 'It's just I thought I had lost you forever.' Oh, Betty, don't you know there's no such thing as forever?

It isn't possible to love and to part.

It is never good dwelling on good-byes ... it is not the being together that it prolongs, it is the parting.

What I said was I’ll miss you what I meant to say was I love you what I wanted to say was that I meant what I said and it’s funny how all those things I could have said flooded my head after we said goodbye and I should have told you I’d be willing to hold you until my flesh crumbles into bone because I’m willing to die alone but god knows I don’t want to live that way.

The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.

If you let go of me now,” I whispered, stretching against him, “it could be another six hundred years before you find me again. Are you willing to take that risk?

The worst part about loving someone, Merripen, is that there will al­ways be things you can't protect her from. Things be­yond your control. You finally realize there is something worse than dying . . . and that is having something hap­pen to her. You have to live with that fear always. But you have to take the bad part, if you want the good part." Kev looked at him bleakly. "What's the good part?" A smile touched Cam's lips. "All the rest of it is the good part," he said, and went.

When a person that one loves is in the world and alive and well, and pleased to be in the world, then to miss them is only a new flavor, a salt sharpness in experience. It is when the beloved is unhappy or maimed or troubled that one misses with pain.

Would you tell Dank that I will alway love him? That I'm sorry that I can't leave here. I'm protecting those I love. But I will think of him every day and I will hum his song to myself every night as I go to sleep.

Love itself cannot be divorced from the suffering which comes from being separated from the object of love.