If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago.

Sometimes I wonder why God ever trusts talent in the hands of women, they usually make such an infernal mess of it. I think He must do it as a sort of ghastly joke.

Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.

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.

When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all.Willa Cather

On the farm the weather was the great fact, and men's affairs went on underneath it, as the streams creep under the ice.

life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.