Willa Cather Quotes

I love New York! You walk around, nobody notices you, you don't notice anybody, you're in your own little world.

My face, my self, what would they mean to anybody? Just another stiff. So this self of mine passes some other's self on the street - what do we have to say to each other? Hey there! Hi ya!That's about it. Nobody raises a hand. No one turns around to take another look.

New York was not a romantic city at [80th]. Nobody knows who you are and you don't have to care about anybody else. It's a very cold city, I should say.

You're not sorry to go, of course. With people like us our home is where we are not... No one person in the world is necessary to you or to me.

You just never set roots; you take pleasure in simple conversations, because you know you're not going to have much more than that. It's very isolating, and that can be a good thing.

Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.

People in New York just go about their business. Maybe living there for a long time, it would get lonely, but there's something really nice about being able to go about your business and not feel like anybody is really paying attention to you or what you're doing.

I've been in Los Angeles for a while, and the kind of psychological connection that one makes to people, it just doesn't happen out here.

In London, people can be so... well, it's not even a case of people being unkind or unfriendly. You just don't make any contact in London. You go from A to B with your eyes on the pavement.

I guess part of the hit-man appeal is the solitude. Everybody is lured to the idea of the solitary life.

I don't have anybody living around me who has much of a sense of what I do. That's exactly what I like.

Even though I write about the human race, the further away from them, the better I feel. Two miles is great; two thousand miles is beautiful.

I liked Los Angeles for odd reasons. For one, there was no sense of community. You were really left to your own resources, spending this inordinate amount of time alone in a balloon of an automobile. I liked that a lot.

London does two things for me: it makes me feel connected, and it also makes me feel very isolated and quite lonely at times, and that's someone with two children in their family.

I don't associate myself with anything. I don't associate myself with where I'm from or where I am.

Welcome to New York, where everybody's a stranger, and nobody is.

To be free is often to be lonely.

In my case, I was stuck there for quite a while. New York is large enough to be a very abstract city, so nobody cares.

And when you don't have to talk to the person next to you, that's real clean. Takes a certain thing not to try to keep anything up, not to have to entertain one another.

When you don’t have many friends and you don’t have a social life you’re kind of left looking at things, not doing things. There’s a weird freedom in not having people treat you like you’re part of society or where you have to fulfill social relationships.

I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.

I am never happier than when I am alone in a foreign city; it is as if I had become invisible.

I'm a thousand miles from nowhere, time don't matter to me. I'm a thousand miles from nowhere and there's not place that I want to be.

in the big city nobody has time to make friends. The big city is a big solitude.

The price for independence is often isolation and solitude.