Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. - Willa Cather

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.

These coppers, big and little, these brooms and clouts and brushes, were tools; and with them one made, not shoes or cabinet-work, but life itself. One made a climate within a climate; one made the days, — the complexion, the special flavour, the special happiness of each day as it passed; one made life.

Her husband had archaic ideas about jewels; a man bought them for his wife in acknowledgement of things he could not gracefully utter.