Willa Cather Quotes

I give people permission to be kids again.

Come clean with a child heart Laugh as peaches in the summer wind Let rain on a house roof be a song Let the writing on your face be a smell of apple orchards on late June.

We know we cannot plant seeds with closed fists. To sow, we must open our hands.

Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair.

In my experience, it is rarer to find a really happy person in a circle of millionaires than among vagabonds.

Man is most nearly himself when he achieves the seriousness of a child at play.

Abundance is a process of letting go; that which is empty can receive.

When I go to Africa and spend more time there with people who are the least of the least, those in desperate situations, I am broken by it. But I also find people with so much more joy and freedom living with nothing than I see walking down the streets of my own community here in Tennessee.

I grew up in New Mexico, and the older I get, I have less need for contemporary culture and big cities and all the stuff we are bombarded with. I am happier at my ranch in the middle of nowhere watching a bug carry leaves across the grass, listening to silence, riding my horse, and being in open space.

Oh! Isn't it jolly To cast away folly And cut all one's clothes a peg shorter (A good many pegs) And rejoice in one's legs Like a free-minded Albion's daughter.

I aspire to feel like a child, how about that!

Life's too short. Don't be afraid to love and then keep loving and keep loving and doing more loving.

We should seek to love our lives and live fully, but not to extend them indefinitely. We should love our children exuberantly, but not cling to them or curtail their freedoms. We should treasure the material world without seeking to own and control it.

It sometimes happens that the town child is more alive to the fresh beauty of the country than a child who is country born

Once I stopped dwelling on what I didn't have, on what I thought I was going to lose, and began to give freely, everything opened up for me. Everything began to flow into my life.

She was considered timid and morose. Only in the country, her skin tanned by the sun and her belly full of ripe fruit, running through the fields with Pedro Tercero, was she smiling and happy. Her mother said that that was the real Blanca, and that the other one, the one back in the city, was a Blanca in hibernation.

Nature seems to have poured forth her riches so without calculation, merely to mark the fullness of her joy.

It's essential that a part of you not grow up. Childhood wonder gives us our spark and beauty.

Dressing is a way of life. It brings you joy. It can give you freedom and liberation, help you to find yourself and to move without restraint. Isn't elegance forgetting what one is wearing?

The country life is to be preferred, for there we see the works of God; but in cities little else but the works of men. And the one makes a better subject for contemplation than the other.

All good things are wild and free.

The more he cast away, the more he had.

Children offer the finest expressions of openness and flexibility. They play and laugh freely, and find wonder in the smallest things.

I like subversive humor, freckles, women's knees and long hair, the laughter of playing children, and a girl running down the street.

I suppose the pleasure of the country life lies really in the eternally renewed evidences of the determination to live. That is a truism when said, but anything but a truism when daily observed. Nothing shows up the difference between the thing said or read, so much as the daily experience of it.