“Where there is great love, there are always miracles.” Willa Cather

“There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.”
― Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

 “Where there is great love, there are always miracles.”
― Willa Cather

 “Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.”
― Willa Cather

 “People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.”
― Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

“The fact that I was a girl never damaged my ambitions to be a pope or an emperor. ”
― Willa Cather

 “The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers...I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own.”
― Willa Cather

“It's all very well to tell us to forgive our enemies; our enemies can never hurt us very much. But oh, what about forgiving our friends?”
― Willa Cather, My Mortal Enemy

“What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, to strong to stop, too sweet to lose.”
― Willa Cather

“Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.”
― Willa Cather

“Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“Men travel faster now, but I do not know if they go to better things.”
― Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

“And now the old story has begun to write itself over there," said Carl softly. "Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years.”
― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

“The soul cannot be humbled by fasts and prayer; it must be broken by mortal sin to experience forgiveness of sin and rise to a state of grace. Otherwise, religion is nothing but dead logic.”
― Willa Cather

“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin just where I left off.”
― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

“I wondered if the life that was right for one was ever right for two!”
― Willa Cather

“Success is never so interesting as struggle”
― Willa Cather

“She had certain thoughts which were like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser friends.”
― Willa Cather

“That is happiness, to be dissolved into something complete and great. ”
― Willa Cather

“No one can build his security upon the nobleness of another person.”
― Willa Cather

“That is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
― Willa Cather

“Sometimes," I ventured, "it doesn't occur to boys that their mother was ever young and pretty. . . I couldn't stand it if you boys were inconsiderate, or thought of her as if she were just somebody who looked after you. You see I was very much in love with your mother once, and I know there's nobody like her...”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.
In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen again.”
― Willa Cather

“I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered –about her teeth for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things she had lost, *but whose inner glow has faded*. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“People can be lovers and enemies at the same time, you know.”
― Willa Cather, My Mortal Enemy

“We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever took we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is to pay our rent, that exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theaters. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.”
― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

“There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young. ”
― Willa Cather

“I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away. The light and air abot me told me that the world ended here: only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one went a little farther there would only be sun and sky, and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.”
― Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock

“‎The idea of you is a part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundereds of times when I dont realize it. You really are a part of me.”
― Willa Cather, My Antonia / O Pioneers!

“But she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions. It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“To fulfil the dreams of one's youth; that is the best that can happen to a man. No worldly success can take the place of that.”
― Willa Cather

“This is reality, whether you like it or not--all those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“I've seen it before. There are women who spread ruin through no fault of theirs, just by being too beautiful, too ful of life and love. They can't help it. Poeple come to them as people go to a warm fire in winter.”
― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

“Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.”
― Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

“Many a night that summer she left Dr. Archie's office with a desire to run and run about those quiet streets until she wore out her shoes, or wore out the streets themselves; when her chest ached and it seemed as if her heart were spreading all over the desert. When she went home, it was not to go to sleep. She used to drag her mattress beside her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating with excitement, as a machine vibrates from speed. Life rushed in upon her through that window -- or so it seemed. In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from without. There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that it was not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor and anticipation. It was on such nights that Thea Kronborg learned the thing that old Dumas meant when he told the Romanticists that to make a drama he needed but one passion and four walls.”
― Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

“Prayers said by good people are always good prayers”
― Willa Cather

“One realizes that even in harmonious families there is thisthis double life: the group life, which is the one wewe can observe in our neighbour’s household, and, underneath, another – secret andand passionate and intense – which is the real life that stamps thethe faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping,escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his ownown affections have woven about him. One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationshipsrelationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there areare innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern ofof our lives day by day . . . ”
― Willa Cather

“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”
― Willa Cather

“The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”
― Willa Cather

“In great misfortunes, people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love--if once one has ever fallen in.”
― Willa Cather, The Professor's House

“I'd have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister--anything a woman can be to a man. The idea of you is part of my mind; you influence my likes and dislikes, all my tastes, hundreds of times when I don't realize it. You really are a part of me.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them by chance, in a lucky hour, at the world's end somewhere, and hold fast to the days...”
― Willa Cather

“Alexandra drew her shawl closer about her and stood leaning against the frame of the mill, looking at the stars which glittered so keenly through the frosty autumn air. She always loved to watch them, to think of their vastness and distance, and of their ordered march. It fortified her to reflect upon the great operations of nature, and when she thought of the law that lay behind them, she felt a sense of personal security. That night she had a new consciousness of the country, felt almost a new relation to it. Even her talk with the boys had not taken away the feeling that had overwhelmed her when she drove back to the Divide that afternoon. She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring.”
― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

“You are the only beautiful thing that has ever come close to me. You came line an angel out of the sky. You are like the music you sing, you are like the stars and the snow on the mountains where I played when I was a little boy. You are like all tha they have killed in me. I die for you tonight, tomorrrow, for all eternity. I am not a cowaqrd; I was afraid cause I lovey ou more than Christ who died for me, more than I am afraid of hell, or hope for heaven. I was never afraid before.”
― Willa Cather

“Yet the summer which was to change everything was coming nearer every day. When boys and girls are growing up, life can't stand still, not even in the quietest of country towns; and they have to grow up, whether they will or no. That is what their elders are always forgetting.”
― Willa Cather

“Look at my papa here; he's been dead all these years, and yet he is more real to me than almost anybody else. He never goes out of my life. I talk to him and consult him all the time. The older I grow, the better I know him and the more I understand him.”
― Willa Cather

“There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share—black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

The more observing ones may have seen, but discerning people are usually discreet and often kind, for we usually bleed a little before we begin to discern.”
― Willa Cather

 “The old man smiled. 'I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.”
― Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

“Pittsburgh was even more vital, more creative, more hungry for culture than New York. Pittsburgh was the birthplace of my writing.”
― Willa Cather

“Some things are best learned in calm, others in storm.”
― Willa Cather

“Love itself draws on a woman nearly all the bad luck in the world”
― Willa Cather, My Mortal Enemy

“Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding.”
― Willa Cather, My Mortal Enemy

“Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.”
― Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

“What was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mold in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself.”
― Willa Cather

“The land belongs to the future.”
― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

“A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.”
― Willa Cather, The Professor's House

“I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air. or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”
― Willa Cather, My Antonia

“Ah! the terror and the delight of that moment when first we fear
ourselves! Until then we have not lived.”
― Willa Cather

“I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

 “He domesticated and developed the native wild flowers. He had one hill-side solidly clad with that low-growing purple verbena which mats over the hills of New Mexico. It was like a great violet velvet mantle thrown down in the sun; all the shades that the dyers and weavers of Italy and France strove for through centuries, the violet that is full of rose colour and is yet not lavender; the blue that becomes almost pink and then retreats again into sea-dark purple—the true Episcopal colour and countless variations of it.”
― Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

“Her eye, her ear, were tuning forks, burning glasses, which caught the minutest refraction or echo of a thought or feeling .... She heard a deeper vibration, a kind of composite echo, of all that the writer said, and did not say.”
― Willa Cather

 “Once giving way to tears, she wept bitterly for all that she had lost, and all that she must lose so soon. Her mother had had the courage to leave everything she loved and to come out here with her father; she in turn ought to show just that same courage about going back, but she could not find it in her heart.”
― Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock

 “It came over him now that the unexpected favours of fortune, no matter how dazzling, do not mean very much to us. They may excite or divert us for a time, but when we look back, the only things we cherish are those which in some way met our original want; the desire which formed in us in early youth, undirected, and of its own accord.”
― Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

 “Alexandra sighed. "I have a feeling that if you go away, you will not come back. Something will happen to one of us, or to both. People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find. What I have is yours if you care enough about me to take it.”
― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

 “There was a new kind of strength in the gravity of her face, and her colors still gave her that look of deep-seated health and ardor.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

 “Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

 “The new country lay open before me: there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seeds as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had a sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Jake's story but, insist that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

 “He was entirely rid of his nervous misgivings, of his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire to show himself different from his surroundings. He felt now that his surroundings explained him.”
― Willa Cather, Paul's Case

 “Doctrine is well enough for the wise, Jean; but the miracle is something we can hold in our hands and love.”
― Willa Cather

 “I only knew the schoolbooks said he "died in the wilderness, of a broken heart."

"More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent. ”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“... the wind sprang up afresh, with a kind of bitter song, as if it said: "This is reality, whether you like it or not. All those frivolities of summer, the light and shadow, the living mask of green that trembled over everything, they were lies, and this is what was underneath. This is the truth." It was as if we were being punished for loving the loveliness of summer. ”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“The two friends stood for a few moments on the windy street corner, not speaking a word, as two travelers, who have lost their way, sometimes stand and admit their perplexity in silence. (O Pioneers!)”
― Willa Cather

“Yes, and because we grow old we become more and more the stuff our forbears put into us. I can feel his savagery strengthen in me. We think we are so individual and so misunderstood when we are young; but the nature our strain of blood carries is inside there, waiting, like our skeleton.”
― Willa Cather, My Mortal Enemy

“And I advise ye to think well, he told her It's better to be a stray dog in this world than a man without money. I've tried it both ways, and I know. A poor man stinks, and God hates him.”
― Willa Cather, My Mortal Enemy

“Money and office and success are the consolations of impotence. Fortune turns kind to such solid people and lets them suck their bone in peace. She flecks her whip upon flesh that is more alive, upon that stream of hungry boys and girls who tramp the streets of every city, recognizable by their pride and discontent, who are the Future, and who possess the treasure of creative power.”
― Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

“Schools are not meant to make boys happy, Cécile, but to teach them to do without happiness.”
― Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock

“While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the foundation of early races.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

 “Antonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade - that grew stronger with time. In my memory there was a succession of such pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts of one's first primer...She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true...She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture...All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“Antonia came in and stood before me...It was a shock, of course. It always is, to meet people after long years, especially if they have lived as much and as hard as this woman had. We stood looking at each other. The eyes that peered anxiously at me were - simply Antonia's eyes..As I confronted her, the changes grew less apparent to me, her identity stronger. She was there in the full vigour of her personality, battered, but not diminished...”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“And that's what makes men happy, believing in the mystery and importance of their own individual lives.”
― Willa Cather, The Professor's House

“Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.”
― Willa Cather

“Some memories are realities and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”
― Willa Cather

“The wild roses were wide open and brilliant, the blue-eyed grass was in purple flower, and the silvery milkweed was just coming on.”
― Willa Cather

“...You know that my spells come from God, and that I would not harm any living creature. You believe that everyone should worship God in the way revealed to him. But that is not the way of this country. The way here is for all to do alike. I am despised because I do not wear shoes, because I do not cut my hair, and because I have visions. At home, in the old country, there were many like me, who had been touched by God, or who had seen things in the graveyard at night and were different afterward. We thought nothing of it, and let them alone. But here, if a man is different in his feet or in his head, they put him in the asylum. . . . That is the way; they have built the asylum for people who are different, and they will not even let us live in the holes with the badgers.”
― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

“The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but the first-rate writer can only be experience. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.”
― Willa Cather

“They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs. The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.”
― Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

“Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness.”
― Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

“One is best in one's own country.”
― Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock

“As I confronted her, the changes grew less apparent to me, her identity stronger. She was there, in the full vigour of her personality, battered but not diminished, looking at me, speaking to me in the husky, breathy voice I remembered so well.”
― Willa Cather

“To be sure, the Bishop was a little theatrical in his humility, as he had been in his grandeur; but that was his way, Auclair reflected, and, after all, nobody can help his way. If a man admits his mistakes, that is a great deal...”
― Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock

“She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true… she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“I was thinking", he answered absently, "about Euripides; how, when he was an old man, he went and lived in a cave by the sea, and it was thought queer at the time. It seems that houses had become insupportable to him. I wonder whether it was because he had observed women so closely all his life.”
― Willa Cather, The Professor's House

“Writing ought either to be the manufacture of stories for which there is a market demand—a business as safe and commendable as making soap or breakfast foods—or it should be an art, which is always a search for something for which there is no market demand, something new and untried, where the values are intrinsic and have nothing to do with standardized values.”
― Willa Cather

“I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“We must rest, he told himself, on our confidence in His design. Design was clear enough in the stars, the seasons, in the woods and fields. But in human affairs—? Perhaps our bewilderment came from a fault in our perceptions; we could never see what was behind the next turn of the road.”
― Willa Cather, Sapphira And The Slave Girl

“Winter lies too long in country towns; hangs on until it is stale and shabby, old and sullen.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.”
― Willa Cather

“But the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness.”
― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

“Mrs. Kronborg was a strange woman. That word "talent", which no one else in Moonstone, not even Dr. Archie, would have understood, she comprehended perfectly. To any other woman there, it would have meant that a child must have her hair curled every day and must play in public. Mrs. Kronborg knew it meant that Thea must practice four hours a day. A child with talent must be kept at the piano, just as a child with measles must be kept under the blankets.”
― Willa Cather

“You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?”
― Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

“You feel that, properly, Alexandra's house is the big-out-of-doors, and that it is in the soil that she expresses herself.
-O Pioneers”
― Willa Cather

“Although I admired scholarship so much in Cleric, I was not deceived about myself; I knew that I should never be a scholar. I could never lose myself for long among impersonal things. Mental excitement was apt to send me with a rush back to my own naked land and the figures scattered upon it. While I was in the very act of yearning toward the new forms that Cleric brought up before me, my mind plunged away from me, and I suddenly found myself thinking of the places and people of my own infinitesimal past.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“Avarice, he assured them, was the one passion that grew stronger and sweeter in old age.”
― Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

“Cavenaugh rubbed his hands together and smiled his sunny smile.

'I like that idea. It's reassuring. If we can have no secrets, it means we can't, after all, go so far afield as we might,' he hesitated, 'yes, as we might.'

Eastman looked at him sourly. 'Cavenaugh, when you've practiced law in New York for twelve years, you find that people can't go far in any direction, except-' He thrust his forefinger sharply at the floor.'Even in that direction, few people can do anything out of the ordinary. Our range is limited. Skip a few baths, and we become personally objectionable. The slightest carelessness can rot a man's integrity or give him ptomaine poisoning. We keep up only be incessant cleansing operations, of mind and body. What we call character, is held together by all sorts of tacks and strings and glue. ("Consequences")”
― Willa Cather, American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps

“The glorious transmutation of autumn had come on: all the vast Canadian shores were clothed with a splendour never seen in France; to which all the pageants of all the kings were as a taper to the sun.”
― Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock

“If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“Have the last woed ma'm," he said cheerfully, "It's a lady's priviledge.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you.”
― Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

“These were the distractions I had to choose from. There were no other lights burning downtown after nine o'clock. On starlight nights I used to pace up and down those long, cold streets, scowling at the little, sleeping houses on either side, with their storm-windows and covered back porches. They were flimsy shelters, most of them poorly built of light wood, with spindle porch-posts horribly mutilated by the turning-lathe. Yet for all their frailness, how much jealousy and envy and unhappiness some of them managed to contain! The life that went on in them seemed to me made up of evasions and negations; shifts to save cooking, to save washing and cleaning, devices to propitiate the tongue of gossip. This guarded mode of existence was like living under a tyranny. People's speech, their voices, their very glances, became furtive and repressed. Every individual taste, every natural appetite, was bridled by caution.
The people asleep in those houses, I thought, tried to live like the mice in their own kitchens; to make no noise, to leave no trace, to slip over the surface of things in the dark. The growing piles of ashes and cinders in the back yards were the only evidence that the wasteful, consuming process of life went on at all. On Tuesday nights the Owl Club danced; then there was a little stir in the streets, and here and there one could see a lighted window until midnight. But the next night all was dark again.”

― Willa Cather, My Ántonia