People have to snatch at happiness when they can, in this world. It is always easier to lose than to find.

When people ask me if it has been a hard or easy road, I always answer with the same quotation, the end is nothing, the road is all.Willa Cather

Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world's hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman's tenderness.

I only want impossible things," she said roughly. "The others don't interest me.

If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky i felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, i felt what would be would be.

Things away from home often look better than they are.

Life was so short that it meant nothing at all unless it were continually reinforced by something that endured; unless the shadows of individual existence came and went against a background that held together.

The two friends stood for a few moments on the windy street corner, not speaking a word, as two travelers, who have lost their way, sometimes stand and admit their perplexity in silence. (O Pioneers!)

It's awfully easy to rush into a profession you don't really like, and awfully hard to get out of it.

A man long accustomed to admire his wife in general, seldom pauses to admire her in a particular gown or attitude, unless his attention is directed to her by the appreciative gaze of another man.

A pioneer should have imagination, should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.

I have sometimes thought that his bursts of imaginative talk were fatal to his poetic gift. He squandered too much in the heat of personal communication.

What was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mold in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself.

It's by understanding me, and the boys, and mother, that you have helped me. I expect that is the only way one person ever really can help another.

Our tree became the talking tree of the fairy tale; legends and stories nestled like birds in its branches.

Religion is different from everything else; because in religion seeking is finding.

The end is nothing, the road is all

He knew he would always remember her, standing there with that expectant, forward-looking smile, enough to turn the future into summer.

I only knew the schoolbooks said he "died in the wilderness, of a broken heart." "More than him has done that," said Antonia sadly, and the girls murmured assent.

I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away.

The land belongs to the future.

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

It was to him a very strange and perplexing place, where people wore fine clothes and had hard hearts.

Nothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing—desire. And before it, when it is big, all is little.

But I can't help feeling scared when I think how I will miss you- more than you will ever know.

She began to wonder whether she would not do better to finish her life alone. What was left of life seemed unimportant.

Schools are not meant to make boys happy, C cile, but to teach them to do without happiness.

You must not begin to fret about the successes of cheap people. After all, what have they to do with you?

I had killed a big snake. I was now a big fellow.

Since then she had changed so much in her thoughts, in her ways, even in her looks, that she might wonder she knew herself--except that the changes were all in the direction of becoming more and more herself.

One is best in one's own country.

Doctrine is well enough for the wise, Jean; but the miracle is something we can hold in our hands and love.

He was entirely rid of his nervous misgivings, of his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire to show himself different from his surroundings. He felt now that his surroundings explained him.

...how easy it would be to dream one's life out in some cleft in the world.

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

The qualities of a second-rate writer can easily be defined, but the first-rate writer can only be experience. It is just the thing in him which escapes analysis that makes him first-rate.

Oh, he’s an old friend from the West,” said Eden easily. “I won’t introduce you, because he doesn’t like people. He’s a recluse. Good-bye.

The spark in his eye, which is one's very self, caught the spark in hers that was herself, and for a moment they looked into each other's natures.

We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.

Her secret? It is every artist's secret--passion. That is all. It is an open secret, and perfectly safe. Like heroism, it is inimitable in cheap materials.

It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the foundation of early races.

And I advise ye to think well, he told her It's better to be a stray dog in this world than a man without money. I've tried it both ways, and I know. A poor man stinks, and God hates him.

You never really knew a man, he said, until you saw him die

There is no God but one God and Art is his revealer; that’s my creed and I'll follow it to the end, to a hotter place than Pittsburgh if need be.

The glorious transmutation of autumn had come on: all the vast Canadian shores were clothed with a splendour never seen in France; to which all the pageants of all the kings were as a taper to the sun.

Avarice, he assured them, was the one passion that grew stronger and sweeter in old age.

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

Don't love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you. Oh, dear boy, pray that whatever your sacrifice may be, it be not that.

Have the last word ma'm," he said cheerfully, "It's a lady's priviledge.

Miracles surround us at every turn, if we but sharpen our perceptions to them.