The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but a first-rate writer can only be experienced. It is just the thing in him which escap… - Willa Cather

It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.

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

Of all the bewildering things about a new country, the absence of human landmarks is one of the most depressing and disheartening. The houses on the Divide were small and were usually tucked away in low places; you did not see them until you came directly upon them. Most of them were built of the sod itself, and were only the unescapable ground in another form. The roads were but faint tracks in the grass, and the fields were scarcely noticeable. The record of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches on stone left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may, after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of human strivings.