6 Willa Cather Quotes on Family

Willa Cather quotes on family

8. Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family - but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.

39. Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.

40. She remembered home as a place where there were always too many children, a cross man and work piling up around a sick woman.

46. It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.

58. Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour's household, and, underneath, another - secret and passionate and intense - which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him.

59. One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works.