Willa Cather

Another is that I do not like his wife.

The light was full of action and had a peculiar quality of climax⁠—of splendid finish.

He was a little country boy, and this village was to him a very strange and perplexing place, where people wore fine clothes and had hard hearts.

The Forrester place, as every one called it, was not at all remarkable; the people who lived there made it seem much larger and finer than it was.

Mrs. Kronborg believed that the size of every family was decided in heaven.

The sun popped up over the edge of the prairie like a broad, smiling face;

He had found that you can train the mind to be active at a fixed time, just as the stomach is trained to be hungry at certain hours of the day.

Her sarcasm was so quick, so fine at the point—it was like being touched by a metal so cold that one doesn’t know whether one is burned or chilled.

I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be.

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

Mischance hung over it. Its Genius was unfriendly to man.

They could not imagine her in any dress or situation in which she would not be charming.

“They aren’t exactly books, Thea,” he said seriously. “They’re a city.”

She was so plucky and so stooped, his dear mother!

If there was one eager eye, one doubting, critical mind, one lively curiosity in a whole lecture-room full of commonplace boys and girls, he was its servant.

A poor man stinks, and God hates him.

In a new country a body feels friendly to the animals.

Instantly that stupid face became intense, prophetic, full of awful meaning.

He always said that the badgers had cleaner houses than people, and that when he took a housekeeper her name would be Mrs. Badger.

He was an ugly fellow, Ivy Peters, and he liked being ugly.