The Prairie Trilogy Quotes

“We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it—for a little while.”
― Willa Cather, The Prairie Trilogy: O Pioneers!; The Song of the Lark; My Antoniá

“Marie stole slowly”
― Willa Cather, The Prairie Trilogy: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia

“People live through such pain only once; pain comes again, but it finds a tougher surface.”
― Willa Cather, The Prairie Trilogy: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia

“He was ready to give up, he felt. He did not know how it had come about, but he was quite willing to go deep under his fields and rest, where the plow could not find him.”
― Willa Cather, The Prairie Trilogy: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia

“poetry of Robert Burns. "Death and Dr. Hornbook" and "The Jolly Beggars," Burns's "Reply to his Tailor," he often read aloud to himself in his office, late at night, after a glass”
― Willa Cather, The Prairie Trilogy: O Pioneers!; The Song of the Lark; My Antoniá

“Sometimes I feel like I'm getting tired of standing up for this country.”
― Willa Cather, The Prairie Trilogy

“The Count of Monte Cristo,' which I had seen James O'Neill play that winter, was by the only Alexandre Dumas I knew. This play, I saw, was by his son, and”
― Willa Cather, The Prairie Trilogy: O Pioneers!; The Song of the Lark; My Antoniá

“I am never able to believe that she has much feeling for the causes to which she lends her name and her fleeting interest. She is”
― Willa Cather, The Prairie Trilogy: O Pioneers!; The Song of the Lark; My Antoniá

“The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is. That afternoon nothing new came to Thea Kronborg, no enlightenment, no inspiration. She merely”
― Willa Cather, The Prairie Trilogy: O Pioneers!; The Song of the Lark; My Antoniá

“Perhaps," he muttered. A Mexican learns to dive below insults or soar above them, after he crosses the border.”
― Willa Cather, The Prairie Trilogy: O Pioneers!; The Song of the Lark; My Antoniá

“her life had not been of the kind to sharpen her vision. Her training had all been toward the end of making her proficient in what she had undertaken to do. Her personal life”
― Willa Cather, The Prairie Trilogy: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia

“John Bergson had the Old-World belief that land”
― Willa Cather, The Prairie Trilogy: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia

“This was the road over which Ántonia and I came on that night when we got off the train at Black Hawk and were bedded down in the straw, wondering children, being taken we knew not whither. I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is. 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. 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, The Prairie Trilogy: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia

“Wagner says, in his most beautiful opera, that art is only a way of remembering youth. And the older we grow the more precious it seems to us, and the more richly we can present that memory. When we've got it all out,—the last, the finest thrill of it, the brightest hope of it,”—she lifted her hand above her head and dropped it,—“then we stop. We do nothing but repeat after that. The stream has reached the level of its source. That's our measure.”
― Willa Cather, The Prairie Trilogy: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia