My Ántonia

by Willa Cather

Old men are like that, you know. It makes them feel important to think they’re in love with somebody.”

don’t want a husband. Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what’s sensible and what’s foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.”

She always kissed one as if she were sadly and wisely sending one away forever.

Great way of kissing

When I took her in my arms she drew away. ‘Don’t, Mrs. Steavens,’ she says, ‘you’ll make me cry, and I don’t want to.’

I thought if he saw how well I could do for him, he’d want to stay with me.’

Sometimes I feel like I’m not going to live very long, so I’m just enjoying every day of this fall.’

I’d have liked to have you for a sweetheart, or a wife, or my mother or my sister—anything that a woman can be to a man.

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.”

You’ll always remember me when you think about old times, won’t you? And I guess everybody thinks about old times, even the happiest people.”

I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.

I took her hands and held them against my breast, feeling once more how strong and warm and good they were, those brown hands, and remembering how many kind things they had done for me. I held them now a long while, over my heart. About us it was growing darker and darker, and I had to look hard to see her face, which I meant always to carry with me; the closest, realest face, under all the shadows of women’s faces, at the very bottom of my memory.

As I went back alone over that familiar road, I could almost believe that a boy and girl ran along beside me, as our shadows used to do, laughing and whispering to each other in the grass.

I did not want to find her aged and broken; I really dreaded it. In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions.

Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.

The trouble with me was, Jim, I never could believe harm of anybody I loved.”

Ántonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade—that

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.

I wondered whether the life that was right for one was ever right for two!

the curious depression that hangs over little towns,

For Ántonia and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be.

Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.