{"author":"Willa Cather","author_id":"Willa+Cather","total_quotes":90,"quotes":[{"text":"He used to say that he never felt the hardness of the human struggle or the sadness of history as he felt it among those ruins. He used to say, too, that it made one feel an obligation to do one's best.","author":"Willa Cather","tags":["history","obligation","ruins","sadness","struggle"],"id":7668,"author_id":"Willa+Cather"},{"text":"They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.","author":"Willa Cather","tags":["conservation","environment","native-american"],"id":8002,"author_id":"Willa+Cather"},{"text":"I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered-- about her teeth, for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.","author":"Willa Cather","tags":["life","living"],"id":13320,"author_id":"Willa+Cather"},{"text":"It seems to me that the pleasure one feels in a work of art is just one thing that one does not have to explain.","author":"Willa Cather","tags":["art","ineffability"],"id":19707,"author_id":"Willa+Cather"},{"text":"I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.","author":"Willa Cather","tags":["acceptance"],"id":41738,"author_id":"Willa+Cather"},{"text":"He had never got so much back for himself from any pupil as he did from Miss Kronborg. From the first she had stimulated him; something in her personality invariably affected him. Now that he was feeling his way toward her voice, he found her more interesting than ever before. She lifted the tedium of the winter for him, gave him curious fancies and reveries. Musically, she was sympathetic to him. Why this was true, he never asked himself. He had learned that one must take where and when one can the mysterious mental irritant that rouses one's imagination; that it is not to be had by order. She often wearied him, but she never bored him.","author":"Willa Cather","tags":["bored","imagination","pupil","student","teacher"],"id":43796,"author_id":"Willa+Cather"},{"text":"I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.","author":"Willa Cather","tags":["realistic","expectations"],"id":53948,"author_id":"Willa+Cather"},{"text":"However much they may smile at her, the old inhabitants would miss Tillie. Her stories give them something to talk about and to conjecture about, cut off as they are from the restless currents of the world. The many naked little sandbars which lie between Venice and the mainland, in the seemingly stagnant water of the lagoons, are made habitable and wholesome only because, every night, a foot and a half of tide creeps in from the sea and winds its fresh brine up through all that network of shining waterways. So, into all the little settlements of quiet people, tidings of what their boys and girls are doing in the world bring real refreshment; bring to the old, memories, and to the young, dreams.","author":"Willa Cather","tags":["dreams","heritage","legacy","memories","renewal"],"id":57444,"author_id":"Willa+Cather"},{"text":"The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify - it was like the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs and the blue drifts, then the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter song, as if it said' 'This is reality, whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.' It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer.","author":"Willa Cather","tags":["winter"],"id":59491,"author_id":"Willa+Cather"},{"text":"Bouchalka was not a reflective person. He had his own idea of what a great prima donna should be like, and he took it for granted that Mme. Garnet corresponded to his conception. The curious thing was that he managed to impress his idea upon Cressida herself. She began to see herself as he saw her, to try to be like the notion of her that he carried everywhere in that pointed head of his. She was exalted quite beyond herself. Things that had been chilled under the grind came to life in her that winter, with the breath of Bouchalka’s adoration. Then, if ever in her life, she heard the bird sing on the branch outside her window; and she wished she were younger, lovelier, freer. She wished there were no Poppas, no Horace, no Garnets. She longed to be only the bewitching creature Bouchalka imagined her.","author":"Willa Cather","tags":["influence"],"id":61516,"author_id":"Willa+Cather"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":90,"pages":9,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}