Willa Cather Quotes

When I see a woman who looks her age, she's radiating something, and it's life.

I don't feel old or used up, and I don't have time to waste thinking about aging, because I live only for my cause.

But, Lord Crist! whan that it remembreth me Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee, It tickleth me aboute myn herte roote. Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote That I have had my world as in my tyme. But age, alias! that al wole envenyme, Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith. Lat go, farewel! the devel go therwith! The flour is goon, ther is namoore to telle; The bren, as I best kan, now most I selle.

Life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible sun within us.

I don't wonder about anything. I'm too old to wonder. I think the most important thing is to wake-up with a pulse. I look in the obituary columns. If I'm not in it, I get out of bed.

Youth is the only thing worth having.

The delicious faces of children, the beauty of school-girls, "the sweet seriousness of sixteen," the lofty air of well-born, well-bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks and manners of youth and early manhood, and the varied power in all that well-known company that escort us through life,--we know how these forms thrill, paralyze, provoke, inspire, and enlarge us.

Youth is about the only thing worth having, and that is about the only thing youth has.

To all, I would say how mistaken they are when they think that they stop falling in love when they grow old, without knowing that they grow old when they stop falling in love...

A youth without fire is followed by an old age without experience.

To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious, gift of life.

Youth and what the Italians so prettily call stamina. The vigor, the fire, that enables you to love and create. When you've lost that, you've lost everything.

There are three things to beware of through life: when a man is young, let him beware of his appetites; when he is middle-aged, of his passions; and when old, of covetousness, especially.

I live! Red life boils in my veins, earth yields beneath my feet, in the glow of love I embrace trees and statues, and they live in my embrace. Every woman is to me the gift of a world. I revel in the melody of her countenance, and with a single glance of my eye I can enjoy more than others with their every limb through all their lives.

The man smiled at him a sly smile. As if they knew a secret between them, these two. Something of age and youth and their claims and the justice of those claims. And of their claims upon them. The world past, the world to come. Their common transciencies. Above all a knowing deep in the bone that beauty and loss are one.

It's [Los Angeles] mostly full of nonsense and delusion and egomania. They think they'll be young and beautiful forever, even though most of them aren't even young and beautiful now.

As full of spirit as the month of May, and as gorgeous as the sun in Midsummer.

I don't think enjoying life is an exclusive prerogative of young people.

Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on!

In a weird way, it’s kind of a relief to think, ‘Oh, I know I’m not that young sort of pretty thing anymore.’ It’s quite nice talking about what it was like to be the young pretty thing, rather than being it.

Basic beauty lies in the way a woman walks; it is health and an attitude to life.

Love is exactly as strong as life.

To make good use of life, one should have in youth the experience of advanced years, and in old age the vigor of youth.

I think beauty is youth; it's energy. I'm attracted to imperfection, style, confidence, and experimentation. So beauty, to me, is really a lot of things. It's kind of unexpected-what surprises you.