Love Quote by Willa Cather

Love, for Cather, isn’t a warm bath; it’s a generator. “Where there is great love, there are always wishes” refuses the tidy idea that affection equals contentment. It links love to wanting, and not in a petty, acquisitive way. Wishes are the mental drafts we write when reality can’t quite hold what we feel. The line suggests that deep attachment doesn’t settle you into acceptance; it sharpens your sense of what’s missing, what could be protected, restored, or finally made true.

The word “always” is the quiet provocation. Cather doesn’t leave room for the sentimental fantasy of love as pure presence. Great love, in her world, tends to be threaded with distance: between past and present, between who a person is and who life let them become, between the prairie’s hard facts and the inner life that keeps insisting on more. A wish is often a form of grief with better lighting. It can be hopeful, but it can also be a confession that love has made you vulnerable to time.

Cather’s fiction is full of characters who carry devotion like a private weather system. They don’t just love; they yearn, they revise, they imagine alternate endings. This line works because it’s emotionally honest without being melodramatic: it treats longing not as love’s flaw but as its evidence. If you can wish, it means you’ve risked caring about outcomes.