Willa Cather

Willa Cather

Willa Sibert Cather (December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947) was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels of frontier life on the Great Plains, in works such as O Pioneers!, My Ántonia, and The Song of the Lark. In 1923 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours (1922), a novel set during World War I. Cather grew up in Nebraska and graduated from the University of Nebraska. She lived and worked in Pittsburgh for ten years, then at the age of 33 she moved to New York, where she lived for the rest of her life.

Read more about Willa Cather:  Early Life and Education, Career, Personal Life, Writing Influences, Legacy and Honors

Famous quotes by willa cather:

    I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.
    Willa Cather (1873–1947)

    Hats have never at all been one of the vexing problems of my life, but, indifferent as I am, these render me speechless. I should think a well-taught and tasteful American milliner would go mad in England, and eventually hang herself with bolts of green and scarlet ribbon—the favorite colour combination in Liverpool.
    Willa Cather (1876–1947)

    From the time the Englishman’s bones harden into bones at all, he makes his skeleton a flagstaff, and he early plants his feet like one who is to walk the world and the decks of all the seas.
    Willa Cather (1876–1947)

    I ain’t got time to learn. I can work like mans now.
    Willa Cather (1873–1947)

    The higher processes are all processes of simplification. The novelist must learn to write, and then he must unlearn it; just as the modern painter learns to draw, and then learns when utterly to disregard his accomplishment, when to subordinate it to a higher and truer effect.
    Willa Cather (1873–1947)