Home > Work > The Selected Letters
1 " 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. "
― Willa Cather , The Selected Letters
2 " I suppose the test of one's decency is how much of a fight one can put up after one has stopped caring, and after one has found that one can never please the people they wanted to please. "
3 " But writing is a queer business. If one does anything that is sharp and keep enough to go over the line, to get itself with the work that is taken seriously, one has to have had either an unusual knowledge of or a peculiar sympathy with the characters one handles. One can’t write about what one most admires always—you must, by some accident, have seen into your character very deeply, and it is this accident of intense realization of him that give your writing about him tone and distinction, that lifts it above the commonplace, in other words "
4 " The great key of success is to work when you are not suited, I fancy. "
5 " Upon publication of The Troll Garden, Witter Bynner sent a copy (along with some of his own poetry) to Henry James, who responded that he found it difficult to read new novels, especially those written by American women, but nevertheless would make an effort for Miss Cather. "
6 " Cather spent her time in Boston not only working on the Eddy articles, but also getting to know something of Boston’s social world, notably celebrated hostess Annie Adams Fields and her companion, author Sarah Orne Jewett. "