Willa Cather Quotes

The secret life of women is to men what the universe is to NASA - unimaginably infinite and completely undiscoverable.

Mystery is underrated, and understanding is overrated.

It's better not to know so much about what things mean or how they might be interpreted or you'll be too afraid to let things keep happening. Psychology destroys the mystery, this kind of magic quality. It can be reduced to certain neuroses or certain things, and since it is now named and defined, it's lost its mystery and the potential for a vast, infinite experience.

The incomprehensible pleases us, the inexplicable is our friend.

Life is a mystery; that means it cannot be solved. And when all efforts to solve it prove futile, the mystery dawns upon you. Then the doors are open; then you are invited. As a knower, nobody enters the divine; as a child, ignorant, not knowing at all- the mystery embraces you. With a knowing mind you are clever, not innocent. Innocence is the door.

We take comfort, however, that mystery is not a synonym for contradiction.

Life is the continuing intervention of the inexplicable.

Something that simply mystifies me.

There are some things that defy explanation- kind of like. . . you know, you.

The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

Women, as they are like riddles in being unintelligible, so generally resemble them in this, that they please us no longer once we know them.

There was no one alive who did not contribute his share of mystery to the world.

History is a living horse laughing at a wooden horse. History is a wind blowing where it listeth. History is no sure thing to bet on. History is a box of tricks with a lost key. History is a labyrinth of doors with sliding panels, a book of ciphers with the code in a cave of the Saragossa sea. History says, if it pleases, Excuse me, I beg your pardon, it will never happen again if I can help it.

Mystery is delightful, but unscientific, since it depends upon ignorance.

I am dying into your mystery, and dying, I am now no other than that mystery. I open to your majesty as an orchard welcomes rain, and twenty times that.

There isnt always an explanation for everything.

I love mysteries. To fall into a mystery and its danger ... everything becomes so intense in those moments. When most mysteries are solved, I feel tremendously let down. So I want things to feel solved up to a point, but there's got to be a certain percentage left over to keep the dream going. It's like at the end of Chinatown: The guy says, 'Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown.' You understand it, but you don't understand it, and it keeps that mystery alive. That's the most beautiful thing.

The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery.

Margo always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.

The more mysterious, the more imperfect; as darkness is, in comparison with light--so is mystery, in comparison with knowledge.

Nothing important is completely explicable.

We're forever teetering on the brink of the unknowable, and trying to understand what can't be understood.

I'm an enigma, an unknown.

Nature is always mysterious and secret in her use of means; and art is always likest her when it is most inexplicable.

Never forget: We are alive within mysteries.