My Antonia

By Willa Cather

QUOTATION: I ain’t got time to learn. I can work like mans now.
ATTRIBUTION: Willa Cather (1873–1947), U.S. novelist. Antonia, in My Antonia, book I, ch. XVII (1918; rev. 1926).

QUOTATION: Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
ATTRIBUTION: Willa Cather (1873–1947), U.S. novelist. Jim Burden, in My Antonia, book V, ch. III (1918; rev. 1926).

QUOTATION: It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.
ATTRIBUTION: Willa Cather (1873–1947), U.S. novelist. Jim Burden, in My Antonia, book V, ch. I (1918; rev. 1926).

QUOTATION: She remembered home as a place where there were always too many children, a cross man and work piling up around a sick woman.
ATTRIBUTION: Willa Cather (1873–1947), U.S. novelist. Jim Burden, in My Antonia, book III, ch. IV (1918; rev. 1926).

QUOTATION: 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.
ATTRIBUTION: Willa Cather (1873–1947), U.S. novelist. Jim Burden, in My Antonia, book V, ch. 1 (1918; rev. 1926).

QUOTATION: As I confronted her, the changes grew less apparent to me, her identity stronger. She was there, in the full vigour of her personality, battered but not diminished, looking at me, speaking to me in the husky, breathy voice I remembered so well.
ATTRIBUTION: Willa Cather (1873–1947), U.S. novelist. Jim Burden, in My Antonia, book V, ch. I (1918; rev. 1926).

QUOTATION: “Jim,” she said earnestly, “if I was put down there in the middle of the night, I could find my way all over that little town; and along the river to the next town, where my grandmother lived. My feet remember all the little paths through the woods, and where the big roots stick out to trip you. I ain’t never forgot my own country.”
ATTRIBUTION: Willa Cather (1873–1947), U.S. novelist. Antonia, in My Antonia, book II, ch. XIV (1918; rev. 1926).

QUOTATION: There seemed to be nothing to see; no fences, no creeks or trees, no hills or fields. If there was a road, I could not make it out in the faint starlight. There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.
ATTRIBUTION: Willa Cather (1873–1947), U.S. novelist. Jim Burden, in My Antonia, book I, ch. I (1918; rev. 1926).

QUOTATION: Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what’s sensible and what’s foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.
ATTRIBUTION: Willa Cather (1873–1947), U.S. novelist. Lina Lingard, in My Antonia, book III, ch. IV (1918; rev. 1926).

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