Quote of the Day: Willa Cather on Love

When Willa Cather was writing at the turn of the 20th century, America was being remade by rail lines, industrial optimism, and the sharp anxieties of a new century, an era that prized motion more than tenderness. That cultural velocity feels familiar in 2026, when relationships are tested by distance, distraction, and the constant pressure to “optimize” our lives. Against that churn, her line lands like a quiet corrective: “Where there is great love, there are always wishes.”

Cather isn’t describing wishfulness as naïve daydreaming. She’s naming love’s most revealing side effect: yearning. Real love doesn’t sit still; it reaches forward. It generates a private weather system of hopes, small, steady ones (get home safe, sleep well, feel understood) and larger, life-shaped ones (heal, grow, build, endure). The presence of wishes is evidence that the heart is invested, that it refuses to treat the beloved as a finished story.

And those wishes are rarely about getting more stuff. They’re more intimate and more demanding: the wish for another person’s dignity, ease, and becoming. In that sense, wishing is not passive, it’s a form of attention that can become action. A hope turns into a text message, a boundary kept, a sacrifice offered, a plan made. The strongest wishes don’t escape reality; they return to it as resilience.

Willa Cather, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist of the American West, understood how longing and devotion shape lives across harsh landscapes, literal and emotional. Her characters often survive on what they dare to hope for one another.

Whether May 31 passes quietly or loudly in your own calendar, the application is simple: inventory your wishes. Then choose one, one phone call, one apology, one promise kept, that lets love’s longing become something the other person can feel.