One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the … - Willa Cather

The country girls were considered a menace to the social order. Their beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background.

Sometimes you will need to be understood; what you never show to anyone will need companionship. And then you must come to me.

He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the buffalo times a traveller used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm, and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told the story. This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed, — these he had caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces, — and this would always be his.