Too much detail is apt, like any other form of extravagance, to become slightly vulgar.
Willa CatherHenry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.
Willa CatherArt, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.
Willa CatherHe 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 purpleโthe true Episcopal colour and countless variations of it.
Willa Cather