Life & Wisdom Quote by Willa Cather

Cather treats desire less like a feeling than like a force of production, a kind of private electricity that turns blank space into a life. The line works because it yokes two worlds that don’t usually shake hands: the irrational (magic) and the measurable (an instrument). She’s teasing a modern obsession with metrics - the fantasy that talent, grit, or “potential” could be quantified - while insisting that the real engine is stubbornly interior, half-mystical, and often invisible until it has already made something.

The phrasing “is creation” collapses cause and effect: desire doesn’t merely lead to art or achievement; it is the first act of making. That’s a novelist’s claim, and a canny one. Cather knew that what looks, from the outside, like “genius” is frequently a sustained appetite: for the work, for the world, for the self one might become. By calling desire “magical,” she protects it from the era’s growing faith in systems, credentials, and industrial efficiency. You can’t spreadsheet a yearning.

The subtext is also a quiet rebuke to polite restraint, especially in a culture that praised modesty and punished hunger when it showed on the wrong bodies. If desire could be measured, she suggests, we’d finally admit how much of achievement is driven not by virtue or inheritance but by intensity - the one resource that can’t be evenly distributed, and can’t be faked for long. Contextually, it sits comfortably in Cather’s broader preoccupation with immigrant ambition, artistic vocation, and the fierce inner weather that precedes any visible success.