3 Willa Cather Quotes on Literature

Willa Cather quotes on literature

72. Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there - that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself.

95. Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole- so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

98. Of course it [football] is brutal. So is Homer brutal, and Tolstoi.