Willa Cather Quotes

Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable.

Reality is modest, it won't be seen naked.

Things are only real after one has learned to agree on their realness. What took place this evening, for instance, cannot possibly be real to you, because no one could agree with you about it. 'Do you mean that you didn't see what happened?'. Of course I did. But I don't count. I am the one who's lying to you, remember?

The reality of what we really are is often times found in the small snips, way down at the bottom of things.

I do believe that reality is dreadful and that you are forced to choose it in the end or go crazy, but that it kills you.

Reality is something that none of us can stand, at any time.

Gone is the blinding glow in his hands - gone, too, is the illusion of purity and beauty! In it's place all that remains is mind-numbing, spine-chilling reality!

Life had taught her that we all require big and small lies in order to survive, just as much as we need air. She used to say that if during one single day, from dawn to dusk, we could see the naked reality of the world, and of ourselves, we would either take our own lives or lose our minds.

Sooner or later,reality does occor and when it does, all the lies show up, like blood on snow.

Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?

Underneath the reality in which we live and have our being, another altogether different reality lies concealed.

Truth is not always a pleasant thing.

I have no time for lies and fantasy, and neither should you. Enjoy or die.

The world is quite ruthless in selecting between the dream and the reality, even where we will not.

He saw something that makes a man doubtful of the constancy of the realities outside himself. It was the shocking discovery that makes a man wonder if I've missed this, what else have I failed to see?

Do not imagine that I would disregard that thing that lies beneath the mask... but be sure that when the outside is rightly seen, the thing that lies under the surface will be found upon your canvas.

This was the void. Not blackness, not nothingness. This was what lay beneath the thinly painted scrim of reality.

It's my belief that sanity lies in realizing that reality is not exactly what we had in mind.

On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.

Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman's body was like that. If you watched it carefully enough you could see how it moved to the rhythm of the world, the deep rhythm, the music below the music, the truth below the truth. He believed in this hidden truth the way other men believed in God or love, believed that truth was in fact always hidden, that the apparent, the overt, was invariably a kind of lie.

Reality is what it is, not what you want it to be.

I has a dream about reality. It was such a relief to wake up.

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.

The world doesn't just disappear when you close your eyes, does it?

How do you tell someone that you weren't the person he thought you were? And more importantly, how did you tell him that you'd meant the things you'd said, when everything else about you turned out to be a lie.