He had seen the end of an era, the sunset…

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.

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A Lost Lady, Part II, Ch. 9

Other Willa Cather Quotes

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 time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day, though they are not down in the list of subjects from which the conventional novelist works. - View Quote Details on One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of…
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There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years. - View Quote Details on There are only two or three human stories, and they…
The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman. - View Quote Details on The history of every country begins in the heart of…
In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again. - View Quote Details on In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with…
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Falling out, for him, seemed to mean falling out of all domestic and social relations, out of his place in the human family, indeed. - View Quote Details on “In great misfortunes,” he told himself, “people want to be…
The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one’s own. - View Quote Details on The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no…
The miracles of the church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always. - View Quote Details on The miracles of the church seem to me to rest…
We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it — for a little while. - View Quote Details on We come and go, but the land is always here…
Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family — but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything. - View Quote Details on Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others…