prayed for the poor and destitute in great cities, where the struggle for life was harder than it was here with us. - Willa Cather

Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.

I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered — about her teeth, for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things that she had lost, but whose inner glow has faded. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.

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.